


You Want It Darker

by thegrumblingirl



Series: assassins don't take sides [6]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Family Feels, Low Chaos (Dishonored), M/M, Not Canon Compliant - Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Pre-Relationship, Slow Romance, Void shenanigans, Yes again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-09-23 03:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17072603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: When Emily’s word had sunk in, of liberation, of the witches’ defeat, and the true Empress’ return, cheers had risen in the distillery, cries of joy and triumph; and even she had felt something settle in her chest at knowing that it was finally done, the journey that had begun so many months — years — ago, ended. Tomorrow, they would count the cost and mourn their dead, but that day, they would know what it was to have been freed from the coven’s stranglehold.A Destiny Beyond Karnaca





	1. Prologue: The Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meagan remembered well the hours spent at the Bottle Street distillery, waiting — waiting for a sign, for a crackling of the speakers, for any news at all from the Tower. It had been ages until they’d heard the characteristic wheezing groan of feedback, and then: Emily’s voice. Promising her citizens that she had returned, and that the witch was dead.
> 
> Dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO! Because I'm on a roll, and because y'all may be asking yourselves, what about assassins now that it's not a Corvo/Daud story anymore — well. There's still a story left to tell, isn't there?
> 
> Billie Lurk, although she's not called Billie Lurk just yet. This is a sneak peek at how her story will begin (again). First proper chapter will go up on January 25, 2019!
> 
> Soundtrack: [You Want It Darker, by Leonard Cohen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y&list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN&index=92).

Meagan remembered well the hours spent at the Bottle Street distillery, waiting — waiting for a sign, for a crackling of the speakers, for any news at all from the Tower. It had been ages until they’d heard the characteristic wheezing groan of feedback, and then: Emily’s voice. Promising her citizens that she had returned, and that the witch was dead.

Dead.

Meagan had suspected it, had half wished for and half dreaded it. Delilah, dead — not banished back to the Void, where nothing ever truly seemed to stay still. If Breanna, powerless as she was, wanted her once great love back now, she could try visiting an empty grave. Meagan had had no doubt thatEmily would do the only reasonable thing and burn the body. At least, she’d hoped she would.

When Emily’s word had sunk in, of liberation, of the witches’ defeat, and the true Empress’ return, cheers had risen in the distillery, cries of joy and triumph; and even she had felt something settle in her chest at knowing that it was finally done, the journey that had begun so many months — years — ago, ended. Tomorrow, they would count the cost and mourn their dead, but that day, they would know what it was to have been freed from the coven’s stranglehold. So long, they had held out, protecting everyone they could, and Meagan wondered how many of them had woken up some days and asked themselves if they were back at the Hound Pits pub; the cold river air whistling through the gaps in the windows. For the Whalers that remained, this had been the second time they’d sequestered themselves away in the service of an Empress.

Hours after Emily’s announcement, Stride had taken them all from the distillery towards the Tower. The clean-up would begin there, to make the grounds and the Tower itself a refuge for the people still cowering in the adjacent districts. Meagan had almost refused to leave the Undine, but eventually curiosity had won out. She had not set foot on Tower grounds in fifteen years, not since the ill-fated day of Empress Jessamine’s attempted rescue and successful murder. Coming up through the water lock that day, she’d found that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

And now, she was back in Karnaca. She’d only lingered in Dunwall for a few weeks after Emily’s return, reluctant to outstay her welcome; and had taken the Dreadful Wale back out to sea once she’d been sure that Emily, Corvo, and Daud were settled. She had not long been able to endure the quizzical stares of the Whalers and the guards, and her spirit had chafed at staying behind high walls, as Emily had offered her a room in the Tower for the duration. She needed the gentle sway of the boat underneath her to sleep and think and breathe. She’d stayed two nights before returning to the Dreadful Wale, still docked down in the district, every night; escorted by a Whaler — for protection, not distrust, she knew, and yet the thought burnt. Most often it had been Thomas, who at least had kept his thoughts and glances to himself. That, too, had been no coincidence.

Eventually, Meagan had told Emily that she needed to leave and, reluctantly, it seemed, Emily had let her go. Not that Meagan would have honestly let herself be kept, in Dunwall of all places. But despite Meagan’s warning words, Emily appeared determined to act as her friend, and wished for her to be by her side as she rebuilt the Empire. Meagan had meant to argue that that was neither her job nor her ambition, but in that moment, Corvo and Daud had come through the door to the throne room, arguing, as was their way, in calm voices about the sense of starting construction work in one part of the Tower District or the other. Emily had sent her a sidelong glance, which Meagan returned by narrowing her eyes. She was not like Daud, always getting pulled into things he had professed not to mean to meddle with — such as trying, and failing, to save one Empress, raising the next instead, and marrying the Royal Protector to boot. She had better sense than that.

Helping the Empress get back her throne notwithstanding.

It was perhaps a week of Meagan looking for shipments to pick up and old connections to call upon before she received a call — a letter — from the Dust District, of all places. Lucia Pastor was helping Hypatia establish a practice there, to be closer to the miners and their families, to treat them in the aftermath of Aramis taking back control over the silver mines. Production had been halted immediately, the refineries busy enough with the surplus Luca had wrung out of the soil and tar for a while yet. This gave the workers time to recuperate or die, and then it could be decided how to resume. With Aramis’ financial backing, Pastor would finally be able to manufacture and distribute the masks that Meagan and Emily had seen at the house, designed to protect the workers’ lungs from the dust. They were asking her to come by and visit them at her earliest convenience.

Meagan wondered what they might want from her, especially now. If it was money, there were other people to talk to — such as the _Duke_ , for instance, or Aramis. As for anything else, there was little Meagan could help them with, surely. Unless… they needed something found out. _Still accepting bets_ , she thought as she laid the letter aside.

As captain, she could have her pick of the tides, so she decided not to postpone and to travel to go see them within the week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) Yeeeessss, Meagan, you go visit Hypatia.  
> b) And here, now, is your reason why Emily insisted that Corvo and Daud bring Martha Cottings with them to Karnaca... :''))  
> c) Welcome to rarepair hell lol  
> d) And yes, slight rewind: this all happens before Billie waltzes into Corvo and Daud's apartment, announcing her new self.


	2. They're Lining Up the Prisoners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who’re you?”  
> “Captain,” was all she gave them, “here to pick up a shipment.”  
> “Gotta be small cargo,” one of them grumbled, and she arched her brow at him.  
> “You’d know all about that,” she said; and while the one she had such insulted scowled at her, his companion laughed throatily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey kids!!! A slight delay/extension to the hiatus, because 2018 has VERY long legs and an enormous foot and was still kicking my behind. But it got better, and now enough of this story is ready to start telling it properly!! This is the final part of assassins don't take sides, and my wrap-up of the Kaldwin arc. POV will be exclusively Billie, updates will be uploaded weekly.
> 
> Yell at me @screwtheprinceimtakingthehorse on tumblr, or @grumblewhale on twitter.
> 
> Soundtrack: [Bury, by Unions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wovS7yMyTAM&list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN&index=93).

Hypatia’s new practice was situated at the top of Batista Overlook, close to Pastor’s apartment there. Together, they seemed determined to build the Dust District back up with their own bare hands — and were it anyone else, Meagan would have doubted their ability. But Pastor and Hypatia were the beating heart of this district. With their arrival, so had hope returned to people’s faces; people who had had no cause for hope for a long, long time under Duke Luca’s reign of silver and greed.

Slowly but surely, the streets were being excavated from the dust. It would take a long time until the houses could be cleared out enough to let builders fix the worst of the damage in order to make the apartments inhabitable again, but with dust crews coming daily to chip away at the evidence of neglect, there was precious work being done. Many of these crews were volunteers, some former guards and officers of the Grand Guard. Meagan was reluctant to trust especially them, as many of them now working with the cleaning crews had left the Guard after Luca had taken the throne. While Meagan understood that this had been their form of protest, it had still left the door wide open for Luca to draft in those who would be easily swayed by money and promises of power. To her, they were as complicit as those who had stayed and remained silent.

Finding Hypatia’s practice was easy enough — many of the miners and their families returned to her almost daily for treatment. After Meagan and the others had left Karnaca for Dunwall, Hypatia and Vasco had gotten to work on a new and improved formula of Addermire Solution. After Emily’s return to the throne, crates of the old serum had indeed be recalled, out of caution; but only shortly before Hypatia had announced that she had developed a new version of it that would work even more effectively against Bloodfly Fever. Meagan had not quite shared Emily’s fears that people would successfully connect the dots between Hypatia’s return to public life, the end of the Crown Killer murders, and possible side effects people across Serkonos may have experienced after the consumption of Addermire Solution. If anything, the resulting big picture was too damned ridiculous to be taken seriously by ordinary citizens. Meagan herself had barely believed it in the beginning.

Meagan brushed past a small group of miners and their families assembled outside and stepped inside the building. Hypatia’s office was on the ground floor, and the door was open. Meagan approached cautiously, not wanting to disturb her while she was with a patient; but when she stepped closer, she only heard Hypatia’s voice and that of Lucia Pastor coming from inside, speaking in hushed tones. So she went up to the door, and rapped her knuckles against the frame to announce herself.

The two women, previously deep in discussion, looked up and upon finding her standing there, waved her inside.

“Meagan! It’s so good to see you,” Hypatia greeted her with a smile, and Meagan almost felt uncomfortable at such a warm welcome. As a trader, she was used to gruff voices and dock workers knowing better than to clap her on the shoulder or to ask her along on a pub crawl. As a smuggler, she was used to suspicious glances and not many words at all. And as she’d once been, as a Whaler, as an assassin, she’d been used to masks and secrets being a more valuable currency than coin. The only one who’d ever shown her kindness she welcomed was Aramis.

Still, she let Hypatia usher her into the room, and she nodded at Pastor, who was watching her somewhat more sensibly. They had known each other for a fairly long time, now, but to Pastor, she had only ever been Aramis’ taciturn friend, the ship captain who understood suspiciously well the workings of the underworld and the Empire. It was only now that it had been revealed to her that Meagan had a past that included a Dunwall street gang, the Empress of the Isles, her Protector — and her Spymaster. Now that Pastor knew she had been one of Daud’s, it was perhaps only right she should wonder what else she’d been hiding.

“Meagan,” Pastor greeted her.

“Morning,” Meagan returned and nodded at them both. “I see you’re already busy with patients.”

“One shift arrives, the other leaves,” Hypatia said as she busied herself with arranging tonics on a shelf above her work bench. “Aramis has them working no more than four hours at a time, now, but until the filters can be handed out, the work is still gruelling. Sometimes I wonder why it needs to be done at all.”

Meagan didn’t have an answer to that — or at least, not one that was kind.

“You must wonder why we asked you to come,” Hypatia continued swiftly, and Meagan raised a brow.

“The thought had occurred,” she drawled, albeit not impatiently; but still Pastor shot her half of a disapproving glare while Hypatia smiled wider from where she stood over the wash basin in the corner, filled with sudsy water and, judging by the smell, high grade disinfectant.

“Lucia, would you?” she asked her friend, while still cleaning her hands.

“Of course,” Pastor nodded, and from a small desk in the corner, retrieved a newspaper flipped open to one of the inner pages. She returned to the work bench and folded it over, then handed it to Meagan, who leaned against the counter to read.

**KARNACA GAZETTE**

_**Missing Pharmacist Found Dead IN UPPER CYRIA** _

 

 

> _The horrifying find of a bloodless body in an alley off Jaconda Street has the Grand Guard on high alert._
> 
> _The victim was Eleuterio Cienfuegos, a respected pharmacist whose family business has been part of the Upper Cyria District community for over fifty years. His body was exsanguinated at another location and dumped in the alley — the same method used in several other recent deaths._
> 
> _The Guard had had no comment on the apparent serial murders, leading some residents to question what they're hiding. "It's another Crown Killer, that's what," claims local baker Madera Jimenez. "The Guard says don't panic, but why wouldn't we? We're all at risk."_

She skimmed the rest of the article, then frowned.

“It says here his belongings will be sold at auction this week because his family otherwise cannot afford the burial and remaining debts. If they were that strapped for cash, how did he afford to keep a shop in Upper Cyria?” she poked at the first thing that gave her pause, though certainly not the only thing.

“And why,” Pastor answered her question with one of her own, “did the Grand Guard rule his death be a suicide?“

Meagan looked back down at the paper, askance. “What?”

“That’s not in the article,” Hypatia said, “but Cristofer is a friend of Lucia’s. He told her.”

“I knew Eleuterio,” Pastor explained. “When I heard of his death, I went to see his daughter to express my condolences. She told me that there was something strange about the manner of his death, so I talked to Cristofer at the Gazette.”

“And why are you telling _me_ this?” Meagan countered. “What am I to do?” Which, she realised, was her first mistake in asking. It presumed that there was something for her _to_ do.

“Go to Upper Cyria. Talk to Teresia, and look into his disappearance,” Pastor said plainly, as if asking her to pick up a cake on her way home.

“Why me?” What was it that always had people thinking she wanted to be their private eye?

“You’re good at this sort of thing,” Hypatia cut in. “Talking to people, investigating things. You helped Emily, Corvo, and Daud with these things all the time while they were on the Wale.”

“There was a coup underway,” Meagan reminded her. “I could hardly stay sitting on my hands and do nothing.”

“Is that what you’re intending to do now?” Pastor challenged.

“I didn’t say that.” Damn it. Meagan hated it when people thought to get at her through her pride — and even more when it _worked_. So often in her life, she had been prepared to tell people they were responsible for their own problems; only to find that some sort of _code_ prevented her from walking away.

She blamed Daud.

“We were hoping you could find out more, discreetly. Teresa would like someone to go with her to the auction. Everything her family had now belongs to the banks. They’ve sent people to her apartment, more than once. To intimidate her into backing off,” Hypatia explained, drying off her hands.

“So you want me to act as though I’m hired muscle?” Meagan asked, sharper now.

“You’re good at that, too,” Pastor said, regarding her down her nose.

“Why is it you don’t bat an eye at Aramis dealings with Daud, but it turns out that I used to run with him and I get the sneer?“ Meagan bit out, her hackles rising.

“He could hardly hide who he was,” Pastor returned. “I simply took you for Aramis’ friend.”

“So Daud wore his killing days on his sleeve, is that it?” The truth was, Meagan thought to tell Pastor through gritted teeth, was that the Whalers had been known, of course, among the nobility of all the Isles after nearly a decade of operations in Dunwall, but that neither Daud nor the Whalers themselves had achieved true infamy until the assassination of Empress Jessamine. Even though they had, in fact, done their best to save her, Burrows had spread lies everywhere that Corvo and Daud had hatched the plan together, and after their flight to the Flooded District, wanted posters and bulletins had made it as far as Serkonos; if only Burrows could not bear admitting that he was incapable of finding them hiding right under his nose. And even after they’d stopped printing that, historians had then gone on to speculate whether Corvo and Daud may have been working together anyhow.

“Please,” Hypatia interjected, stepping up to them with a placating gesture. “Corvo and Daud haven’t arrived yet, otherwise we would have asked them for help with this.”

Meagan wondered whether that was supposed to make her feel better. Still, she shrugged.

“Fine. I’ll look into it. I’ll go to the auction with his daughter, and gather some information. When I’m done, I’ll hand it off to the journalist at the Gazette. Or Corvo and Daud, if they ever come deign to show up.” Emily had told her, just before she’d left Dunwall, that Corvo and Daud were meant to move to Karnaca soon after rebuilding efforts in Dunwall had begun; but so far, there had been no word of their impending arrival.

“Thank you,” Hypatia said earnestly, and Pastor nodded in what was probably gratitude.

Meagan did not intend to wait around to find out, however, and instead slapped the newspaper back on the counter and made for the door. “I had better get going.“

“Of course,” Hypatia agreed.

Meagan had reached the door when Pastor called after her, “I did not mean to insult you.“

She turned.

“And yet, you did.”

 

* * *

 

 

Meagan returned to the Dreadful Wale with unstoked fire in her belly — Pastor’s hurt feelings were not her concern. She would leave Hypatia to smooth things over, or not; it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to get along with those who would still send her off on what could barely be called a contract. It was a request and, for Hypatia’s sake, one Meagan would follow. Besides, ever since her first visit to Upper Cyria and since she’d learnt a little more about the Eyeless, she’d had this vague idea of sending someone up there to mess with their presumably finely laid out plans; as finely laid out as their livery. Newspaper reports were scarce, but clear enough to understand that the gang had established a near stranglehold on the district — which could not be accomplished without friends in high places. Meagan had no doubt that they were involved in this, one way or another; even if the pharmacist may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Karnaca as much as Dunwall, there were no coincidences. In that light, the death of Cienfuegos was as good a place to start as any. Personally, Meagan couldn’t care less about a dead apothecary in a far-away district. She’d let his daughter and the reporter handle it, and then she’d wash her hands of it. But Corvo and Daud, when they came back, would appreciate the information, she was sure.

The next day, she took the skiff up the canal, docking it where she had last time, near the boulevard, and made her way through the streets. She’d chosen late afternoon to go, late enough for the streets to be mostly quiet, but not yet late enough for the voice over the speakers to remind citizens that they had no reason to be out after dusk, and that their place was with their families. Meagan did not doubt that the Abbey had their hand in these announcements, as idle hands and a wandering gaze usually got up to much more mischief at night than in broad daylight — especially the gleaming daylight that seemed to rule over Upper Cyria, where everything glistened in the sun and no-one would dare put a toe out of line.

The auction selling off Cienfuegos’ belongings was in three days; more than enough time to do some snooping and take what she might learn back to Cienfuegos’ daughter and, if necessary, that reporter from the Gazette Hypatia had mentioned. If he could be trusted, anyway. Chances were the Grand Guard might have bought him off in the meantime, if they thought there was a chance they might not get away with calling murder by bloodletting a suicide.

She knew that Cienfuegos’ daughter Teresia kept an apartment and workshop not far from her father’s pharmacy, but since the newspaper article said that he had last been seen at his shop, Meagan would head there first. Chances were, if something to do with business got him killed, she was more likely to find clues as to those dealings there. Jeorge had spared not exactly spared the details in his recount of the crime, and the Grand Guard did not like to have the press describe the circumstances of any murder, much less when a body had been completely drained of blood and then thrown into a dark alleyway in the dead of night. Of course, in this case, it hadn’t been the first time. Whether this was the work of a group or one deranged individual, bodies had been dropping recently — ever since the Coup, Meagan had observed when she’d dug up old newspaper articles from the piles of gazettes Corvo and Daud had collected during their investigation and had been so kind as to leave behind for her to dispose of. Now, she was almost glad she hadn’t.

Heading up Duchess Lisandra Avenue, Meagan took a right to pass through a small alley, past a taxidermy shop. There were guards stationed here, too, but they paid little mind to her; and she preferred having to pass through only one checkpoint rather than two. As she arrived at Cienfuegos’ shop, of course she found it shut up good and tight at the front, but she wondered if the bank’s agents had thought to attach as ugly a lock to the back entrance of the house. Looking around to make sure that no-one was paying her any mind, no matter that she was not wearing her best coat — which, to these people, still would’ve been rags barely fit to clean the stove — she slipped into the alley leading around the house.

The back door lock was indeed easily picked, a skill which had served Meagan Foster the smuggler just as well as Meagan Foster the purveyor of honest trade goods in recent years. Making sure to stay out of view, she hurried inside and poked around the shop downstairs. Tinctures, serums, potions… and laudanum, as far as the eye could see. Poppy tincture, in simple words; but difficult to manufacture and expensive in both production and acquisition. Doctors across Karnaca would murder for a stash like this. But would anyone else? If this was what the bank was after, perhaps they had gotten rid of Cienfuegos to foreclose the estate. As far as she knew, the debt was now under the purview of the Dolores Michaels Savings and Loan — just up the street.

The shop did not reveal any documents regarding debt or indeed any of Cienfuegos’ finances; his client register and account books were missing. If he’d been a member of the Upper Cyria community for over fifty years, many things could have happened in that time, including bankruptcy. But just from the state of the shop, Meagan would not have assumed that the man had been in any financial trouble. Shaking her head, she made to move upstairs. Cienfuegos’ apartment was smaller than the shop downstairs, but it looked homely and lived in. Clearly, he had lived here most of his life. Silvergraphs of his family lined the walls of the hallway, as well as captures of Upper Cyria itself, and other sights of Karnaca.

But it was what Meagan found in the room facing the street that had her pause, and then curse. Why was it always her getting stuck with the weird ones?

Cienfuegos had painted the Void, over and over. Dark scapes of rock and rust, it seemed. Even a giant whale in one of them. She had never been in the Void, but she had heard enough from Daud when she was young to know that it wasn’t a place one forgot. Despair, he’d said, souls screaming for the help that never came. Just like Dunwall, she’d thought cynically. She’d been so young then.

She knelt to examine one of the paintings, propped up against the easel in the corner. It sat in an inevitably expensive gilded frame, and the oil paint still shone, as if the painting had not been finished until only a few days ago. The title plaque read, ‘Impressions of the Void n°2,’ and it showed the remnants of houses, torn apart and out of alignment. Daud had told her that often the Void would look like upside down mirrors of Dunwall. Was this Karnaca, then, in the Void? A figure stood in the foreground, dressed in the same grey and black. A young man, lanky, standing among the ruins, half-turned towards the viewer; although, like this, Meagan felt almost more like being called out as an unwelcome spectator to something she did not fully understand.

And indeed she did not — how had Cienfuegos dreamt this up? There were many accounts, floating around, of people’s encounters with the Void. Dreams, séances, near-death experiences, drug-induced phantasies. The Void was ever-present in their lives; and perhaps that was why the Abbey of the Everyman was so insistent upon warning them of its influence. Everyone seemed to have a concept of the realm beyond this one, and even of the Outsider himself. Was this him, then? Was this its god, reviled and revered?

Was this _real_?

If it was, what had begun as a mundane murder investigation was fast becoming something much, much stranger.

Meagan had no time to look around further, as she was interrupted in her thoughts by raised voices from outside. She went to the window and carefully peered out into the street: two guards were arguing with a young woman, who was gesticulating angrily. Meagan quietly cracked open the window a little to hear.

“I have a right to retrieve my family’s personal possessions!”

“All of your father’s things will be sold at auction, miss,” the Guard’s officer told her angrily, “there’s nothing you can do. We can’t let you up. If you want your father’s things, you’ll just have to buy them back.”

“They’re mine in the first place!” she cried. That was Teresia, then. Meagan shook her head. Perhaps she should have gone to see her before coming here. As it was, she could do nothing for her now. The commotion outside increased, and more guards were attracted by the spectacle. Meagan stayed at the window, watching, until another officer finally succeeded in turning Cienfuegos’ daughter around and away, persuading her to go home and wait for the auction; or at least the morning, when she could appeal to a judge.

Satisfied that the situation hadn’t escalated, Meagan closed the window and turned to leave. Pavement had gone too hot for her to be around, in case the guards decided to check the apartment for evidence of tampering. She left the boulevard, and the district, the same way she’d come in.

On the way back to her ship, Meagan mulled what she’d seen and heard over in her mind. Cienfuegos and the Void… had he been obsessed with it? She’d seen it often enough, in people who had found runes or bonecharms and held onto them desperately; especially once the Rat Plague hit Dunwall. Some hoped to absorb the Void’s powers, others went mad listening to runes’ songs and hisses. It was a seductive whisper — a whisper she’d spent a long time studiously not thinking about. After leaving Dunwall, she’d yet watched herself for signs of the plague for months, that ugly murmur never quite letting go at the back of her mind. But she’d gotten away, from the rain and the muck and the rats. She’d got away with her life, only to nearly lose it to a Grand Guard sword; only that was now a false memory. But she still had it, still half-remembered, and in her dreams there were no halves about it.

One day before she’d ferried Emily, Corvo, and Daud back to Dunwall, Hypatia had taken her aside, her expression worried. She’d said things about Daud, about the state he’d been in when he’d returned from the Void; about how Meagan’s collapse had reminded her. She’d said she’d been unresponsive for so long, and sometimes it had been difficult to look right at her. Her explanation had not made the most sense to Meagan then and did little now, and yet… Voidsickness, Hypatia had called it.

One thing was for certain: Meagan definitely was sick of the Void.

 

* * *

 

Three days after her first visit to Cienfuegos’ apartment, on the day of the auction, Meagan found herself back in Upper Cyria; this time, to speak to the pharmacist and painter’s daughter, Teresia. She knew her to be a determined young woman, from the way she’d argued with the Grand Guard, but that determination alone would not secure her family’s estate; Meagan might have told her that for nothing.

She took the same route she had last time — in the skiff, she didn’t have much choice, and she was secure enough in her anonymity that no-one would take note of her approach down there. The only reason anyone in Upper Cyria would mark her was to complain that there wasn’t more being done to keep the ‘riff raff’ out, she thought acidly. She took a shortcut through to the boulevard, and then headed up the street. According to records she’d found in the apartment above the pharmacy, Teresia Cienfuegos lived here, on Ferella Way, in the same building where Cienfuegos kept his workshop. Pharmacists usually kept up different places for producing and selling their wares, if just to keep one hidden and make the other less of a target for thieves and other ne’er-do-wells. If Cienfuegos really had been entirely exsanguinated, then he had likely received a sample of his own goods first. Meagan did not know for certain whether Teresia was intent on following in her father’s footsteps and taking over the pharmacy; but she supposed it would be the smart thing to do. There _should_ be enough money in it, even if the dire circumstances of the estate seemed to contradict that assumption.

As she got closer to the apartment building, she realised that there was a commotion outside: people talking animatedly, a few guards and officers trying to keep them back while others were coming in and out of the house. She moved towards the other side of the street, so as not to make the impression that she had business in that house, but slowed her pace. Two construction workers were leaning against the building opposite, watching the excitement from there, obviously hindered in their duties.

“What happened?” Meagan asked them, crossing her arms and jerking her chin at the crowd across the rails.

The men cut her a glance, suspicious.

“Who’re you?”

“Captain,” was all she gave them, “here to pick up a shipment.”

“Gotta be small cargo,” one of them grumbled, and she arched her brow at him.

“You’d know all about that,” she said; and while the one she had such insulted scowled at her, his companion laughed throatily.

“She got you there,” he said, while the other muttered to himself. To Meagan’s question, he answered: “Been another murder. You heard of that apothecary, Cienfuegos?”

“Yeah,” Meagan said.

The worker nodded up towards the building. “They found his daughter this morning. Hanged herself.”

“What,” Meagan bit out. Inside her, she felt a pit open up as black as the Void. Dread was waiting within it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) YO PASTOR tone down the judgemental tone, would ye  
> b) I've picked up Death of the Outsider by the scruff of its neck and started tickling it.  
> c) Basically, how do you get Meagan Foster to pay attention to you and your shady dealings? You piss her off.  
> d) As for how Meagan is going to decide to unbury Billie Lurk... stay tuned...........  
> e) Also, Meagan: ugggghhhhh side quests, *again*


	3. And The Guards Are Taking Aim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reinvention of Billie Lurk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go, kids: this is the return of Billie Lurk. This chapter has gone through a lot of iterations, as has Meagan/Billie's decision to dig up the past. If y'all are waiting for a certain cryptic little shit to make an appearance... have a little more patience ;)
> 
> Content warning for this chapter: mention/discussion of alleged suicide.
> 
> Soundtrack: [Fire, by Barns Courtney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7ECTqXQ-fI&index=94&list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN).

“Suicide?” Meagan managed. “Who ruled that?”

“Grand Guard, right after they found her,” the worker said. “Pretty obvious, when the door was locked and the girl was swinging from a pipe.”

“Sure,” Meagan replied. “Obvious.” _Choffers_. Of course these idiots would be fooled into believing that Cienfuegos’ daughter chose to kill herself the night before the auction that would cost her her entire family estate. Nobody else could _possibly_ have a motive. She clenched her fists. _Tangled up like a bag of snakes_ , she heard Daud’s voice in her ear. And here, just as much as in Dunwall, the same snakes were slithering through the grass.

Without another word for her new friends, Meagan left Ferella Way. She would try to get a look at the crime scene some other time — for now, she had another destination in mind entirely. Someone who might be able to help her shed some light on this case, and the darkness that seemed to be lurking behind the shining facade of Upper Cyria.

Once she arrived at the offices of the Karnaca Gazette, she realised that she wasn’t the only one who had this idea — only the editor’s current visitors might not have the district’s best interests at heart. Their own, however…

It might have been a few years, but Meagan recognised the telltale sounds of a dust-up from down the hall.

“You know what that means,” a woman’s voice said in a cajoling tone, to the tune of someone very big kicking in the stomach of someone much smaller. “Stop nosing into our business, or we’ll snap off your fingers one by one. Try typing those little stories of yours with bloody stumps.”

“You won’t get away with this,” wheezed a man. “Do to me what you want. I’m not the only one working on this story.”

The woman scoffed, and her companion laughed.

“You _are_ the only one working on this story, because your colleagues all think you’re daft,” she hissed. “No-one wants to believe you.”

“If you kill me, all my research will be published by my attorney,” the journalist shot back, and Meagan rolled her eyes. He had gumption, she’d give him that, but not much common sense. Not for dealing with people like this. He might as well give them the name of his lawyer now, save them the trouble of digging it up. If they didn’t already know.

Another punch, another grunt.

“That’s enough. Let him down. Better pray we don’t come back, Cristofer.”

Meagan retreated down the stairs before they might see her, and hid in the alcove underneath the staircase, waiting for them to leave.

“You serious about breaking off his fingers?” was the first Meagan heard the thug talk.

“He won’t go snooping around asking questions about Jacobi after our little chat,” the woman answered. “But if our reporter friend doesn’t wise up fast, next time you can make his neck a bloody stump.”

Meagan leaned a little out of her hiding place to get a look at them, and what she saw made her stop in her tracks. The woman had expansive tattoos, on her arms, her back and shoulders, as much as Meagan could see above the collar of her shirt.

She was covered in wreaths of roses.

She had to have been one of Delilah’s. After Breanna’s fall and Delilah’s death, the Eyeless were perhaps the best poised to let those of the coven who hadn’t fled Serkonos (and hadn’t been arrested on the authority of Her Majesty the Empress) continue spreading terror on the streets. Some of them might believe they had no other choice. Others might enjoy it. Young women from all over the Isles had joined Delilah and Breanna for reasons no better or worse than any of the Whalers had had when they’d joined Daud. It was simply that the Whalers, through fortune and blind luck, had found a way out. At least, some of them.

Seeing Galia again had been one of the most surreal moments of being back in Dunwall. _Officer_ Fleet. That loud-mouthed merc who liked to have two drinks too many and cursed like a sailor. Still did, Meagan had it on good authority. She did not doubt that for Fleet, after Daud’s disappearance, there had been two ways this could have gone; much like for Meagan herself. They’d both pulled themselves up, somehow. She knew Fleet had never much liked her, and even less after her betrayal. Would have liked to take her place, perhaps. But Meagan was glad, in a way, that she’d survived to watch over everyone. Fleet as much as anyone had had nothing left to lose when she’d joined the Whalers and accepted Daud’s powers. And now, she had a purpose and, if Meagan were to interpret the way she and Lizzy Stride had looked at each other across the yard of the Bottle Street distillery, someone to share that with, too.

Meagan shook her head, bringing herself back to the present. Daud had given them a family, and so had Breanna done for these girls. Not Delilah herself — she had thrived off the power of her coven, had let them feed her own; but when the time came, she had always isolated herself to walk the final steps alone, to bask in her own triumph. That, in the end, had been her downfall. Corvo and Daud had ruined her plans the first time, and now Emily had ended her life with a slice of her blade. One had been enough.

As ridiculous as it sounded, but Daud had, even in his most bloodthirsty days, relied on his Whalers. Delilah had only understood using people, because that was what the world had taught her. Breanna, too, in the end, had been discarded. She was in prison, now, awaiting her sentence; and her coven was scattered once again, by the wind that came down from Shindaerey Peak.

Meagan waited until the erstwhile witch and her friend were gone, and then headed back up the stairs, finding the door to the newspaper offices still open.

“Hello?” she called, not very eager to find herself at the receiving end of a bat, just in case the editor had decided to arm himself in the event his tormentors came back for more. What was his name again? “Jeorge?”

“In here,” a man called back, sounding tired.

Meagan made her way along the hallway, and found the man in question sitting in an armchair, bleeding all over himself and the upholstery. His left eye was nearly swollen shut, his nose was definitely broken, and noses like that bled like a stuck pig unless you put ice on it; that would never change. She leaned against the wall across from him, crossing her arms.

“You look like shit,” she told him.

“Haven’t checked yet,” he said, groaning when he went digging in his pockets and came back with a box of matches. He pulled half a cigar from his vest pocket. “And who are you, if you’re not here to beat me up some more?”

“An interested third party,” she said. “What did they want from you?“

He eyed her suspiciously.

She sighed. Of course — responded to a stranger calling his name from the door, but clammed up as soon as he realised she wasn’t there to finish the job.

“Hypatia and Pastor sent me. They knew Cienfuegos, the pharmacist. That’s what this was about, right?”

“Well, if Lucia _sent_ you,” the journalist said, gingerly touching the side of his face and grimacing when his fingers came away sticky, “at least you know the right people.” He huffed. “Hand me that rag, would you?” he pointed at one of the desks holding silvergraph equipment and a camera.

Meagan retrieved one of the less crusty rags and threw it over. He folded it up to find a clean spot and pressed it to his brow.

“Some Eyeless goons tried to ‘persuade’ me to stop the Cienfuegos investigation. I must be onto something big. First the old pharmacist, now his daughter? They’re covering something up, and something tells me it’s not just the deaths.”

“What deaths?” she asked, playing dumb. She knew very well what he meant — she’d read the damn article — but she wanted to hear it from him; see if he really believed it or whether it was rehearsed.

“Where have you been the past few weeks?“ he asked her.

She shrugged.

“Fine,” he sighed. “Karnaca’s had a string of gruesome murders: all the blood drained from the victims while they’re still alive. Bodies end up dumped in the canal or in back alleys, and every time the Grand Guard labels it a suicide. Which is more ridiculous than a ‘robbery gone wrong,’ but admitting that there are robberies here in Upper Cyria would upset residents’ equilibrium far too much.”

“And suicides don’t?”

Jeorge shrugged. “At least then they can blame the victims for their own bad lot in life.”

Meagan snorted. “Of course. And who do you think is behind it?”

“I can’t say for certain yet. The Eyeless are involved, of that much I am sure. I don’t doubt that I earned this beating by talking to that bruiser at the Spector Club. An oaf, had little information, but there’s something about what they’re calling the Sanguine Infusion that doesn’t sit right with me.”

“The what?”

“A special treat, they call it. There’s a waiting list for it a mile long.”

“You think it’s connected?”

“You think it’s a coincidence?” Jeorge returned.

“What about the bank that now owns Cienfuegos’ estate? With his daughter out of the way, they don’t even need to hold the auction. They can just take everything. And Teresia wasn’t bled dry.“ There was witty repartee in there somewhere about banks and bloodletting, but Meagan would let the reporter pick that one off the floor if he was so inclined.

“Who says the bank and the Eyeless aren’t connected, too?” he suggested. “In fact, I’ve been collecting evidence that a local politician, Yvan Jacobi, might be the go-between. He’s in and out of that bank more often than not, and he’s a regular at the Spector.”

Yvan Jacobi… she’d seen his face on posters up and down Duchess Lisandra Avenue this week.

“Are you watching him?” she asked skeptically.

Jeorge sent her a look.

“I can bribe street kids as well as you. Assuming that’s what you do when you have better things to do than watch the entrance of a bank all day, even if it is right across the yard,” he gestured towards the balcony doors.

“Anything else you’re paying street kids to do?“

He shrugged. “Keeping an eye on the bank, the Spector, and Shan Yun’s house, occasionally.”

“Were the two buildings always connected?” Meagan asked.

“They were, actually. The Spector used to belong to an architect and his family. They built the skyway to be able to move between their private residence and their offices without getting their shoes dirty. I think they built it more to prove that they could. When the firm went out of business a few years ago, the estate was seized by their creditors, represented by—”

“Dolores Michaels Deposit and Loan?” Meagan guessed, interrupting.

“The very same. The Spector was opened last year, and the residence was renovated and then put up for sale. Shan Yun moved in only a few months ago.“

“Right after his arrival from Tyvia?”

“No, he’s been in Karnaca for over a year. He used to live in another part of the district, if I remember correctly. Why?”

“If the Eyeless are keeping secrets in their precious club, then they wouldn’t just let anyone move into that house. Someone must have introduced him.”

“So if we find out what new acquaintances he’s made since his arrival…” Jeorge nodded.

“We? You mean you,” Meagan corrected him.

“If you’re not going to investigate all this, why are you here?”

“I told you, Hypatia asked me to look into it, to see if there’s anything worth investigating at all. That’s what I’m doing. I’ll collect what I can and hand it off to someone else.“

“Who?” Jeorge narrowed his eyes.

“There’ll be someone coming down from Dunwall soon. He’ll be able to help.”

“Why not you?”

“I’m just here to do someone a favour,” Meagan deflected, willing the man to drop it. “That’s all.”

Back in Dunwall, back in the day, they had always done their utmost to stay out of the way of the press — for more than just the obvious reasons. Of course, sometimes there had been information to be obtained from a printer or a reporter working on a piece pertinent to one of their contracts (or, often enough, _about_ the fallout of one of their contracts, especially when Daud handled them personally), and some had even been on Daud’s pay roll, but usually only for a very short time. If someone outside of the Whalers knew too much about who they were interested in, it would have been far too easy to trace some of their contracts back to whoever was paying them for either murder or blackmail material. Meagan had collected plenty of that — well. Billie Lurk had, especially during her first few years with Daud. She had needed to prove that she could separate gossip from relevant information, for one thing; and for another, Daud had had some strange rules about who was given hit jobs while they were legally too young to own property.

She shook her head surreptitiously. All this poking around in things that weren’t any of her business — nor her problem — was bringing back more echoes of the past; and in strange ways, stronger than during any of the reconnaissance she’d run while harbouring a fugitive Empress and her two protectors on a damned ship that could suffer a Grand Guard raid any moment.

“Fine,” Jeorge said at length. “Here.” He handed her a card. “That’s the address of this office and my private address as well. Your… friend can contact me once he’s ready to look into this. And if I’m not dead by then.”

Meagan turned the card between her fingers.

“You’re not backing down, huh?”

He cut her a glance.

“Someone has to stick up for something in this district, even if everyone else is too complacent to.” He shrugged. “It might as well be me.”

“And die for it?” Meagan challenged. Martyrdom had never appealed to her.

“I’ll make every effort not to,” he returned, sarcasm evident. “I’m not a hero. I’m just a journalist.”

There wasn’t much to say in response to that, Meagan found. She raised the card in her hand, turning towards the door.

“I’ll pass this on.“

“Please do. Out of interest: who should I expect to come knocking?”

“Corvo Attano,“ Meagan said lightly. At Jeorge’s widening eyes, she smirked. “Bye now.”

*

On her way back to the Dreadful Wale, Meagan still felt that roiling in her gut. Heading out along the avenue, she had picked up chatter that the auction had not been called off but merely postponed, ostensibly in a gesture of condolences towards the Cienfuegos family. Meagan suspected it had more to do with bringing in more potential buyers to really drive up the price. Those paintings might be worth a pretty coin — to the right crowd. Having Teresia there to make a scene would have cast a slight pall on the occasion.

But why kill her now, the night of the auction? Why not earlier? Meagan supposed it might be sold to the world as Teresia realising that she would never win back her family’s estate, and ending things before witnessing it. There had been a petition, started by Teresia, calling for support among the merchants of the district to push back against the bank’s business practices. Perhaps she had attempted to muster up financial support as well, funds to help her buy back her father’s personal belongings, at least. Meagan did not doubt that all such suppositions would be used to explain away her taking her own life.

She did not need to see the crime scene to know that it was a lie. But she would have to to be able to prove it.

Catching herself in that thought, Meagan tightened her hold on the skiff’s throttle lever. She might as well hoist herself over the gunwale now if she was truly considering becoming involved in this. She looked out over the bay, the horizon beckoning. An entire ocean out there, and she was going to stay in Karnaca, digging around in a murder investigation that had nothing to do with her?

 _Just until Corvo and Daud arrive_ , that little traitorous voice at the back of her head whispered. She could collect what evidence there was, then hand it over and let them deal with it. Corvo would not mind the chance to get to know the new editor of the Gazette a little better; especially if he was as nosy a shit as Jeorge presented himself to be. According to the journalist, the bank, the Eyeless, and the city administration were connected. A city administration Corvo and Daud would have to work with, through the Council, eventually.

But first, someone would have to give Hypatia and Pastor the bad news.

 

* * *

 

 

That night, Meagan had trouble finding rest. She could not forget the pit that had opened up inside her when she'd learnt of Teresia Cienfuegos’ death. Something dark and strong had reared its head — an old wish. That same wish had once driven her to break into an abandoned manor in the middle of the night, to take on the Duke of Serkonos; only to find an Empress touched by the Void and a plaything given to her by no-one but the Outsider himself. She had not had the mind to think much on it then, but in the years since it had only served to fuel resentment towards the black-eyed bastard. Where was her Timepiece, she wondered. Where was her chance to unmake the past? She knew these were questions she would never receive answers to. Not even Daud had them. But she wanted them, still.

It was that same drive that had given her the strength to walk the streets of Dunwall as a child, to keep surviving after her family had turned her out, to keep going even after Deidre had been taken from her. Daud had given her the means to visit pain on those who had wronged her, and she’d done it. It had been what had gotten her up in the morning.

Meagan Foster had long struggled to find a different reason. Sure, she'd always wanted to be a captain. Setting her sights on that had been the easy part. The hard part was learning to talk. Daud had never demanded that she express herself. She often had, with vigour and vitriol, but her strengths had lain in skulking around and digging up secrets from where people had buried them; in ledgers and archives and hidden diaries. As Meagan Foster, she’d had to relearn to approach people, to get information out of them not at the tip of a blade, but with her wits alone. Not hard, as such, but unfamiliar. She'd been a thieving street kid, she'd been an assassin and a blackmailer, but she had never been a conversationalist. No-one would ever accuse her of sweet-talking anyone, certainly not the grumpiest dock workers in Morley. She was just as gruff and just as bad-tempered, but she knew how to demand respect — perhaps because she was that way. But she’d made a friend or two, too, that way. Aramis Stilton had surprised her, in choosing her ship to ferry his cargo because of its ‘interesting name,’ and in being courteous and respectful when at first she’d barely said three words to him before seeing that he was good for the money. He’d endeared himself to her, somehow, and he remained one of the few people with whom she felt comfortable enough to let her guard down.

She'd learnt to be quiet, too. To wait a mark out until they revealed what she wanted to know all on their own. It was how she'd gotten her hands on more than one smugglers’ cache. Meagan Foster had done her best to mind her own business, but still there were people who knew her name, for its own reasons. She was a smuggler, fence, and maybe traitor, depending on who one asked. Names were always overshadowed by the words whispered after them.

_Killer. Assassin. Murderer._

If you hid from the world long enough, eventually nobody remembered you. Then you were alone, living with your choices.

Billie Lurk had been, perhaps, her truest self. It was a strange way to live. Inured to death and suffering, yet still so very angry. She would have burnt the city down and called it justice, but denied that it was personal. She would have slit the throats of a hundred magistrates and called it ‘just a job.’

She had never cared about the bigger picture, not the way Daud had. He’d been the one to look at the city and its Empress, its plague-ridden streets and decide that it was _enough_. Billie Lurk never would have made that call. Not until after it was too late. And perhaps, not even then.

She had never professed to care. About the weak, the dying. She had not acted in their name.

But when she slithered in through the window of a mansion, when she tracked down her target and watched them bleed until they died, she whispered into their ears about the children in their mines, about the dead workers in their factories, about the families left on the streets in the wake of their taxes. She knew every last one of their crimes.

She betrayed Daud to a witches’ coven and called it a foregone conclusion. The right of succession. As though they were kings of an empire of shadows.

And then, when the day came, she couldn’t go through with it.

For years, she had hidden from her past. For years, Meagan Foster had been paying Billie Lurk’s debts. She’d spied for Corvo, and still deluded herself that she was done with Dunwall, done with her history, done with that life. The day after that night in Aramis’ house, she hid her Whaler blade where no-one would ever find it. She’d written her letter to Corvo, telling him she was done. She’d never regretted it.

There were two memories inside her, warring and contradicting. One of her had meant it, cradling her ruined arm and drinking so the pain might lessen. The other… had merely been waiting.

Both had decided to act when Sokolov had been taken — of all the reasons to break their silence.

Thinking about it made her ache, though not the way the dreams did. She would wager only Emily herself might be able to tell apart her memories like this, which belonged to one and which to the other. But then, she hadn’t been the one undone.

It wasn’t about Cienfuegos. Not even about his daughter. She didn’t know these people — it wasn’t _personal_. And still, Meagan Foster lay awake, wondering upon Billie Lurk’s debt to the world. To herself. To Daud. It would mean changing everything. Again. Going back, going forward. It was all the same, in the end.

She rolled over and let her eyes slide shut, calling upon years and years of sleeping whenever she could to let her thoughts quieten — not that it had always worked. Not that she was sure that it would now. As she drifted off, she heard, distantly, the quiet purr of a small engine. Probably a fishing boat, headed out towards the Ocean, to lay out new nets. She almost envied them a reason to be awake just then.

 

* * *

 

 

It was in the morning, when the sun was up and she had had at least one cup of coffee, that she learnt that it had not been a fishing boat.

“Son of a—” she cursed when she stepped up on deck. A trail of blood led from the starboard-side door — which, mercifully, she locked every night when she was alone on the ship (which, for blessed years, had been _always_ ) — to a linen bag, lying further up the deck, in the middle of the locked cargo hold doors. It looked like a small bundle. Meagan set down her cup of coffee and cautiously approached. She cast her eye down each side of the ship, but found no-one hiding close by. Almost as an afterthought, she glanced up the foremast, although how anyone except for Emily would ever find those rafters comfortable enough to stay up there for longer than five minutes, she would never know.

But she was alone, and there was nothing to do but examine the strange… gift someone had left for her. She bent to inspect the bag from the outside. It lay strangely flat, too flat to be a clockwork explosive — and no ticking, either. Meagan reached out and touched the material. It was coarse, roughly spun, like a potato sack from the market. No other visible markings. No note, she thought sarcastically. How rude.

“Nothing for it now,” she murmured, and reached for the band loosely holding the bag closed; and with the other itched for the knife she kept tucked in her boot.

It came away easily, and the bag fell open almost on its own. What Meagan found inside, however, made none of this remotely easy.

“Shit!” she cursed, and reared back a little. It was a _hand_. A severed hand, pale and stiff. By the looks of it, it had belonged to a young person, a woman, Meagan would say, estimating they’d been in their late twenties, perhaps early thirties. There were no scars, no distinctive marks on the palm of the hand, but when Meagan reached out gingerly to turn it over, she found a crude tattoo on the back of it, still new. A symbol, all sharp angles and lines. Held this way or that, it rather reminded Meagan of a bonecharm. The line work was somewhat jagged, but clear. Whoever the victim was, they could not have been conscious at the time, but neither had they been dead yet. The wound had still bled, and only death had stopped it from healing. The _artist_ evidently was not practised in giving tattoos, but had coloured inside the lines, so to speak.

It took Meagan a moment to realise what she was doing, holding the hand up to examine it. She scoffed, half-gagging, and dropped it, and it landed on the bag a foot away from her.

“What do you think you’re doing, Foster,” she muttered to herself before she looked up again. She couldn’t help but look at that damned hand, and this time she realised something else. It was a _left_ hand. A left hand with a tattoo never spelt anything but trouble.

And this one, she had seen before. On people lingering outside the Spector Club. On the witch come to threaten Cristofer Jeorge. Amongst her roses, she’d carried this. _Can’t type with bloody stumps,_ she thought.

Meagan stood, turning her back on what she’d found, and went over to the railing. She sighed.

It was a warning, wasn’t it. They had found Meagan Foster, captain of the Dreadful Wale, and they’d delivered her a warning. A threat to stay out of things that did not concern her. That part was easy — what puzzled her was how they’d found her. She doubted Jeorge had talked, and they wouldn’t have come to rough him up twice in one day. She hadn’t seen anyone she recognised in the street that day, but… it might have been one of the guards around the district; if they’d ever worked by the docks before, they could have recognised her.

And now, the _Eyeless_ felt they had to try to intimidate her? A ship captain? Could they have _any_ inkling who she was, or that she had good reason to come to Upper Cyria? Or was it merely her visit with the reporter that had put her in the crosshairs? She supposed she, or the Dreadful Wale, might have been seen around during the Coup; helping people who looked suspiciously like the Empress of the Isles and her Protector. Even if nobody had cared to recognise Daud, they couldn’t have been blind enough not to know who the other two had been. Blind enough to pretend ignorance, certainly. And if the Eyeless had contacts far and wide enough across the city to make the connection…

She let her head fall forward. Perhaps it wasn’t even a warning. Perhaps it was a _challenge_.

She laughed. It was that kind of thinking that had always gotten her into trouble.

*

The ride in the skiff to the Aquintila Repair Station passed in a blur.

She dug up the crate she’d buried, opened it, and then stopped. Just stopped, and stared. She’d kept her Whaler blade on her ship, at first, in a storage chest in the engine room. Out of sight, out of mind. Then, after the events at Stilton’s house, she had packed everything up and brought it here, for it to be far away; lest she be tempted to use it before the time was right. She had promised Emily not to interfere, and she’d _kept_ that promise.

And now, she was breaking it, in the worst way.

Her fingers trembling, she retrieved the sword. It hadn’t seen blood in so long. Even when she’d kept it on the ship, she’d always made sure not to have occasion to make use of it. A Whaler knife, a mark of her past and shame. But it was not all she’d hidden.

There was something else.

Carefully, she dug deeper into the crate and found it, wrapped in fabric. She drew back the muslin, finding… her.

“Deidre,” she whispered. “You stole this for me so long ago.”

 

* * *

* * *

 

 

It was nigh on a month later that she finally made a decision. Daud and Corvo had arrived in Karnaca two weeks ago, and were getting settled in the Palace District. A more expensive address than either of them could have ever hoped for in their youth. It might not seem strange to them now, having lived in Dunwall Tower for so long — even if Daud had likely never used the front door in his life — but she had to suppress a laugh as she stood outside the building further down on Ravina Boulevard. It was a far cry from the shithole she had once followed Daud into; the place where her life had changed, yet again.

And now, she was making another choice that might prove her undoing.

Corvo opened the door for her, surprise on his face. He led her into the study, where Daud was waiting. They looked good — happy. Less drained and gaunt than they had on the last leg of their journey back to Dunwall.

“Heard you were looking for agents,“ she said without preamble. He knew Daud had taken in every detail of her clothes. Her sword. Her bearing. He exchanged a glance with Corvo, obviously deciding to play along at a moment’s notice. Did he imagine he was indulging her?

“We are.“ He paused. “Name of the applicant?“

She straightened her shoulders.

“Billie Lurk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) As per usual, I took the plot and kept the bits I liked and threw everything else in the Wrenhaven :'D timeline, what timeline?  
> b) That's a nice present, eh??  
> c) Papa Daud and his stupid rules dfhdkjfhsdkjfhds


	4. If You Are The Dealer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are heating up in the Outsider fandom — and Billie ends up with even more work to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And finally, we meet Martha Cottings again!!!
> 
> Soundtrack: [Watch Me, by The Phantoms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ_v2wkBt3k&index=95&list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN).

_Be honest with yourself, Billie_ , she thought at herself in the mirror one morning, a few weeks later. _You knew that the dreams wouldn’t stop just because you dug up a sword_.

And yes, perhaps she had known. But then her dreams had turned to darkness and everything flickering before her eyes, a soft voice begun murmuring at her from the hollow of a casket that sat in the middle of the deck, flames surging up around her; and she turned to find herself back as a child, and Daud looming over her as he’d once been, his face already so weathered but still so young. And then he changed, and was wearing the uniform of the Royal Protector, and then Corvo stepped up beside him, in a Grand Guard officer’s uniform and helmet, and then they spoke to her—

 _You have meddled with things beyond your understanding_.

When she woke, her hand found her neck, her fingers digging into her hair and _pulling_ , the pain waking her and dragging her back into reality. She let go and dropped her hand, moved to lean back on her arms braced on the thin mattress and let her head fall back. She kept her eyes open for fear of tumbling back into the dream.

 _I understand_ , she wanted to call out. _Time travel. It’s bad for you!_

But she didn’t, and of course she knew there would have been no answer. Were her dreams the Outsider’s doing? Could they be? Would he have taken an interest, after her presence that night in Aramis’ house, after Emily had taken care to help her, even if that meant putting the sequence of events that followed at risk? Was she marked, somehow, by Time or the Void, for having found herself altered from one stream to the next — if that was indeed how Time was to be understood. But Billie imagined it had to be: if the Timepiece had allowed to jump from one skein to the other and change the past without irreconcilably altering the present, then time had to be the fabric out of which everything else was woven. She had always pictured the Void to be that way; her and the other Whalers bound to Daud like marionettes, his movements tugging them this way and that as he gained new powers. They had danced to a tune only he had ever truly heard, but translated for them: into commands, contracts, lessons. She would never dance to that tune again.

Even now that Billie Lurk had returned to the world, she would not ask Daud to share his powers with her as he had used to; and he would never offer. That bridge between them had crumbled into the river. She would make her own way, rely on other lessons he had taught her. He’d made her more than just a killer, and she had picked up more than one trick herself. She knew and understood things Daud never would. He could not give her orders, now.

She brushed aside the pain and dread the dreams had brought, to think more about what she’d seen. Daud, Royal Protector, and Corvo no more than an officer… how far back would one have had to go to set them on such different paths? Daud was the best, but Attano was _better_. If Daud had ever won the Blade Verbena, it would not have been against Corvo. Billie smirked at the thought — uncharitable, perhaps, of her old mentor. But he was old, now, and would perhaps forgive her if she mentioned the idea to him and Attano one of these days.

They had settled into the Palace District quite well, and Billie had visited them a few times after the first to discuss what she had found out about the Eyeless; before and after their abysmal attempt at intimidation. Daud had made a face when she’d mentioned burying the hand where she had unearthed her sword and other things Billie Lurk would not have wanted found. No doubt it had reminded him of _something_ when she’d described it, but he wouldn’t say, and Attano had merely cast a knowing glance. Since it was tinged with amusement, not concern, Billie did not think too much of it.

They’d discussed what steps should be taken next; and Billie had laid out her plan. She had only been back to Upper Cyria once since the Eyeless had found the Dreadful Wale and traced her back to it, and then she’d remained on the outskirts of the district. It had taken her a while and some hours of snooping in some of the more rat-infested slums of the city; but eventually, at the Albarca Baths, she had met a few thugs and former witches who carried the same kind of tattoo. Not always the same markings, there were variations, but the symbolism was unmistakable. Watching a few fights and placing a few bets by the pit, she finally wheedled out of one of the retired fighters the name of the artist: Eolina Rey. It had only taken a short visit to Upper Cyria to find her beauty parlour — which had been closed to customers at the time. Apparently, as Billie learnt while scoping the place out, due to an incident with river krust dust improperly used as disinfectant. Oh, Void. Considering that the treatments offered at that parlour included Fetal Rat Paste Masks and Living Leech Treatment, Billie was not so sure that anyone who thought to add river krust to the mix really should be punished. If the rich willingly poisoned themselves, someone might as well finish the job.

Once inside, Billie had wasted no time in finding the Red Camellia’s client list, and three names had stood out to her: Shan Yun, the singer. Dolores Michaels, the owner of the district’s bank. Yvan Jacobi, city administrator. They were all names she had heard mentioned before, in conjunction with the investigation into the Cienfuegos’ murders, and without. Everyone else on the list seemed like small fry compared to them. She had taken these three names to Corvo and Daud, who had agreed to gather their own information. Daud had regarded her — and her curiosity — warily, but had made no attempt to dissuade her.

* * *

 

When she arrived (and knocked, by some ingrained memory that she would have sworn to have tossed into the Void at some point during the past fifteen years, in the same way she had always knocked on the door to Daud’s office in the old Chamber of Commerce, and at the Hound Pits), however, it was neither Corvo nor Daud who opened the door for her.

“Lurk,” Cottings greeted her and stepped aside for her to enter. It had been easy for Cottings, formerly of the Dunwall City Watch and now on secondment to the Grand Serkonan Guard, to get used to the old, new name. They had found themselves having quite a few conversations during Billie’s stay at Dunwall Tower after their return and the name Meagan Foster had meant little to Cottings then, beyond knowing that she had been one of Corvo’s former informants in Serkonos. Billie had learnt that Cottings had been part of the debacle at Wyrmwood Way, and she’d wondered if that story could have been the key to all this. If Cottings only could have remembered what had happened in that house… By that year, Corvo and Daud had not had to fight any threats beyond the pale for years, since Delilah’s first banishment — until after her return. And then, Broken Tom one year, and that deranged Tyvian the next. Meagan Foster, after her run-in with Emily in 1849, had kept herself apprised of the goings-on in Dunwall, including any royal… scandals. Adding to this, her conversations with Cottings had been enlightening, indeed.

After the Coup, not all of the Whalers had gone back to donning their Watch uniforms, and it had been a strange picture. So many people she had once known by their frame and their masks, now in City Watch blue. Others, in leather coats still — or, rather, again — similar to Daud’s. They were Thomas’ agents now, and obeyed him as they had the old man. And moving in their midst, unfazed by the magic and the bonecharms, had been Cottings, wearing her Watch uniform like a second skin as if she’d been born in Dunwall; the only one apart from Curnow and one Billie had never met before, an officer named Simmons. Billie had learnt the hard way not to trust those colours: the stripes of Dunwall’s armed guard meant pain and persecution, whether she was a street urchin trying to scrounge together enough to make it through another week sleeping under a leaky awning or an assassin bent on punishing the whole world for her own suffering. Lower watch guards had thrown stones at her as young as seven years old.

Cottings had shaken her hand and introduced herself — and again a few weeks ago, when Billie Lurk had announced her return; and that name had not left her unimpressed, that much was obvious. But then, she’d also been working for the Knife of Dunwall for years, and Billie didn’t like the thought that yet again, Daud’s reputation robbed her of her own. She didn’t like to think like that. As it was, Martha Cottings was sharp and no-nonsense, which Billie could appreciate. She was handsome, too — a thought Billie had pushed aside as soon as it crept in. And if she was not surprised at working with Daud’s former lieutenant, then perhaps at least at the fact that Billie Lurk was, miraculously, still alive.

“Officer Cottings,” Billie returned the greeting as she walked in, glancing down the hall for a sign of one of the old men. “Returned from the Dust District, I see. How are things up there?”

“Dusty,” Cottings said drily, then shrugged. “Byrne and Paolo are keeping to the truce, unbelievably. Stilton is working on restoring his house, but I’m sure you know more about the work that takes than I do. I’ve only been inside once.”

“It’s not going to be easy.” Before Billie could say anything else, Corvo appeared in the doorway to the study.

“Billie. I thought I heard your voice. Daud and I found some records regarding Upper Cyria that may be of interest to you.” He smiled, then looked between them for a moment. “But take your time.” He disappeared again, and Billie stared at the empty doorway for a moment, confused; then she turned back to Cottings, who didn’t seem to pay it any heed. Hardly surprising — she’d been working with the Royal Protector ( _former_ Royal Protector, Billie mentally corrected herself) for several years now. She was likely as used to Corvo’s idiosyncrasies as Billie had once been to Daud’s.

Speaking of —

“Lurk, get in here!” Daud’s voice called from inside the study. Billie and Cottings exchanged another glance and then together they moved down the hall and entered the study, which Billie found did not look altogether from how she remembered Corvo and Daud’s shared office at either the Hound Pits pub or, most recently, Dunwall Tower: maps covering most horizontal and vertical surfaces, notes and reports pinned to them, pictures of targets or persons of interest scattered in between. On one such district map, Billie recognised Shan Yun, Dolores Michaels, and Yvan Jacobi.

Resolving to ask Cottings more questions about the Dust District at a later date, Billie turned towards the board.

“What have you found?”

“You should start with Jacobi,“ Daud began, pointing at the man’s long-faced portrait.

Billie gave him a glare over her shoulder.

“Not telling you how to do your job,“ he said plainly, blithely ignoring the look Corvo sent him across the desk. “Just telling you what you need to know.”

“And what _do_ I need to know,” Billie asked as she crossed her arms, looking back at the map. Three locations had been marked, as per her own information: the Red Camellia, the Spector Club, and Cienfuegos’ pharmacy.

“Jacobi is the weakest link,” Daud explained. “Michaels is too secure in her position to go down easy, and Shan Yun has… fans. Whether Jacobi is personally responsible for Cienfuegos’ death or not, he’s the most likely to fold and give up the others to save his own skin.”

“So if he’s the first pawn to fall, the other two still won’t be too worried because they think they can’t be touched. _Or_ they get nervous and make a mistake,” Billie concluded, tilting her head. “That might work.”

“I know this pains you to admit,“ Daud returned wryly.

“Why would it?” Billie said, just enough bite to her words for Daud to consider the barb received and understood, as she turned and walked back to the desk. She was conscious of Cottings watching them, their interactions undoubtedly curious to someone who had only ever heard the stories — if that. Billie doubted either Corvo or Daud had discussed the events that had come to pass at the Hound Pits pub with anyone during the past fifteen years, and the Whalers had always been a bunch of tight-lipped bastards; even Galia Fleet — even drunk. She wondered what anyone who had no idea of the history between Billie Lurk and the Knife of Dunwall would make of this. _History_. Billie hated that word. It suggested that past was past, when in truth it was the beast that lived inside you, crawling through the maze and threatening to swallow up every better thought you might ever have if you weren’t careful to cut off its head every time it grew back.

“Jacobi has a public appearance planned,” Corvo interjected, handing her a poster obviously torn off one of the announcements boards in the city. “Colibron Plaza, tomorrow afternoon. He’s been speaking out against the practice of regraving in order to make room in cemeteries.”

“It’s a sad day when undertakers run out of graves to dig,” Cottings commented, lifting the corner of one map to reveal one of Karnaca’s graveyards underneath. “That’s what you get for settling against a mountain range.”

“Regraving is common in Cullero, too, isn’t it?” Billie asked.

“It is, especially in the outer villages. We just don’t get worked up about it,” Cottings put it bluntly.

Billie supposed that no-one in the room right then had a particular opinion on the topic — but Yvan Jacobi certainly did. And if he was determined to air his grievances publicly, then who were they to deny him the opportunity? It would undoubtedly have been _easier_ to simply pay him a visit at his home address, but she did not like to wait for things to be easy, if they needed to be done.

“So I’ll go. Anything I should pick up on the way?” she asked.

“Be wary when you talk to the journalist,” Corvo cautioned her. “He shows no inclination to stop looking into the Eyeless, but last time I spoke to him, he seemed exhausted. He’s made preparations for his research to be published through channels other than his attorney. He’s scared.“

“You think they can get to him?”

Of course, there was Grand Guard patrolling the square outside the bank, which the Gazette’s offices shared; and Billie knew that Corvo had had their squad captain advise her officers to keep an eye on Jeorge and the editorial staff there. But that was no guarantee of safety.

“Someone has already delivered you a hand,” Daud reminded her. “Next time, it might be his.“

Billie shrugged. Fair enough. She’d be cautious, then.

“I could come along,” Cottings offered out of the blue, drawing all eyes towards her. She shrugged exaggeratedly in response. “I wear Serkonan colours again now.”

“I might… look different, but they’ll still recognise me,” Billie told her before Corvo and Daud could rattle off a list of reasons why that was, or wasn’t, a good idea. “I might not have wanted posters out for me yet, but if they do have connections within the Grand Guard, it’s only a matter of time. It’s better if we’re not seen in broad daylight together.”

Cottings raised a brow.

“What about a midnight raid, then?” she challenged, and Billie fought the edges of irritation rising within her.

“I’ll let you know,” she responded tersely, hoping she had held at least most of it back. Going by the way Cottings’ expression closed, she had not been entirely successful.

* * *

 

Billie decided to use the skiff to travel to and from between the Dreadful Wale, now hidden at the old repair station, and Upper Cyria; and any other place in Karnaca she might have in mind to go. The repair station, of course, also afforded her the luxury of a carriage that could take her anywhere in the city. But it also limited her to one route in and out of any district, and she liked to keep her options open.

She hadn’t thanked them in so many words — or any — but Corvo and Daud’s efforts to do reconnaissance for her at least spared her some of the snooping around necessary before any job. Her mark, Yvan Jacobi, strived to make it almost too easy for her, and it was all she could do not to let her natural pessimism run away with her and figure that the easier this job would be, the rest would be much more difficult to make up for it. Yvan Jacobi had kindly agreed to embarrass them all with a poorly rehearsed speech — poorly rehearsed in the literal sense, Billie concluded as she spent some time just on the edge of Colibron Plaza, watching his nervous pacing up and down the small stage. He kept interrupting himself and starting over, discarding thoughts, jokes to break the ice, or arguments in the same breath as he conceived of them. She settled in to watch and wait him out. She hoped he would return home yet before the performance. As city administrator, he was surrounded by guards when he appeared in public, as was good and proper in theory, but not when she had a job to do. Of course, what she’d said to Cottings was true: the Billie Lurk of 1852 had a vast advantage over her past self. There were no wanted posters decrying her crimes _here and now_. She was free to move around in most areas of the city, if carefully, even if soldiers may not always like the look of her, with her crimson coat and the sword strapped to her belt. But in Upper Cyria, the Eyeless would have everyone on their pay roll out to look for her, even if she had not been back in some time, even if they likely only knew to speak of her as Meagan Foster — yet. At least they would not recognise hers as a Whaler blade. It had been too long, and the markings had faded from common memory.

 _Don’t think about it,_ she cautioned herself. Pondering the passage of time never led anywhere, she’d found. Daud might have warned her of nostalgia, one evening on the Dreadful Wale, while on the return journey to Dunwall; but it was not love of the past that frightened her. It was sinking down into the black hole it had made of her life. She had returned to her true self, to Billie, and to Lurk, and it was the last of those names that reminded her most forcefully of the Whalers: they had given it to her. When she’d started, Daud’s knife just gone from her throat and thunder in his eyes at the thought that she held no regard for her own life and freely told him so, she’d just been Billie. And before that… her own mother had turned her out, her father hadn’t cared. Only Deidre had ever truly loved her, and Deidre’s love had been the only one she’d been able to accept for a very long time.

So she laid the past aside and watched the present as it passed her by. The future might yet have something in store for her, but she dared not hope.

She knew better.

*

Eventually, Jacobi left the square. The sun was close to setting, and he only had an hour before he was due before his adoring crowd (or at least so was his expectation, she wagered). Billie turned her face and lingered below the stairwell leading up towards the plaza, waiting for the guards to pass by. Then, she followed, and waited again, this time for two of the guards to take up stations outside the house while the others continued on up towards Raqueza Avenue. When their backs were turned, she slipped past them and inside the house. To think, she reflected, that Yvan Jacobi had lived just across from Teresia Cienfuegos, and never spoken to her a single time about her father’s estate; despite the countless letters the pharmacist’s daughter had written in search of assistance and support.

Heading up the stairs, Billie wondered whether she ought to have a little _chat_ with Yvan, instead of merely stealing his secrets. But then, if she delivered what proof she might find to Jeorge at the Gazette, she might not need to. As she bent to pick the lock and listened for movements from inside through the keyhole, she resolved to do this quietly. Jacobi had talked her ear off enough, for one day. Or, possibly, for a lifetime.

Before she opened the door, she drew a deep breath, to settle herself. She had underestimated this — what it would feel like, to do this once again. A little bit of spying for Emily was one thing, but this… the thrill of stepping into places she did not belong, uncovering secrets that were not hers to reveal. Knowing that being spotted meant disaster — or, at least, one scandalised politician shrieking for help, in this case.

In the end, it _was_ almost too easy. Jacobi stood by the pool table, still muttering to himself, still trying to work out the punchline. She crept up behind him, reminded herself how, and then wrapped her arms around his neck. He struggled in her hold long enough for her to increase the pressure, but then he soon passed out, and she let him slide to the floor without a sound. She searched the entire apartment, swiftly and efficiently, letting her instincts take over. She felt under the desk and pool table for hidden switches, examined the bookshelves and cabinets.

It turned out, however, that Jacobi was far more careless than she’d thought he would be: she found immutable proof of his involvement in Cienfuegos’ murder — more than involvement, he’d _done it_ — in a badly disguised wall safe, hidden behind a hideous painting. No-one would hang that up their office if not to hide something even more disgusting behind it. She leafed through his journal, finding self-aggrandising prose about Jacobi himself as well as his family. Something else for Jeorge to comb through, then.

She paused when, on the shelf behind his desk, she saw a strange, buzzing contraption: a rock, floating in a glass flask, held afloat, it seemed by crackling bursts of what might be electricity; but belied by its purple hue. She was reminded of the lanterns once lighting the path to shrines, not of the lethal danger of Walls of Light and Arc Pylons. The rock itself was hewn and black as night, and cast in, so it seemed, no particular shape. It was just a rock. Experimentally, she used the switch on the side to turn it off. The rock fell to the bottom of the flask — when she turned the switch the other way, it rose again. That was all it did. Billie considered it for another moment, then decided it wasn’t worth the bother until she knew more about what it could be. Some strange mineral, a type of ore? She’d never seen anything like it — perhaps Hypatia might have an idea. With a shrug, she moved on.

On the desk, she found a letter from the Dolores Michaels bank, something about one of two keys to a vault — the other belonged to Shan Yun. The key itself was nowhere to be found, neither in the study nor on Jacobi’s person. Perhaps it had not yet been sent. Curious, she thought. But that was not all.

She was about to turn to leave, when she spotted a framed illustration on the wall to her left. _The Twin-Bladed Knife_ , it said. And it was, but it were not the twin blades that intrigued her, not only. The sabre guard looked exactly like that of an Overseer blade, she realised. She muttered the words to herself in want of a memory… she had heard that expression before.

The clock on the wall chimed — time for her to leave. She’d return to the Wale and, the next day, to Corvo and Daud; before taking her findings to the Gazette. They might know how to make sense of this. With the mystery of his death solved, she let her thoughts wander back to Eleuterio Cienfuegos. Pharmacist, patriarch — painter.She’d done well not to think too much on visions of the Void. Had he ever truly seen it? Had he heard its voice, had he heard the songs whispered by runes and charms marked with the Outsider’s sign?

No matter, she decided. He was dead, and any whispers he might have heard, he had taken with him to the grave.

* * *

 

It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been _possible_. It shouldn’t have been her.

She went to bed that night with those same whispers still prodding at her: secrets of the Void, half-remembered from hushed conversations in the Whaler dorms when she was younger and, later, just as quiet lessons from Daud when they returned from a contract with the dawn chasing them from the shadows of the streets. She knew things she shouldn’t, but could not tell the truth of any of it. She had no concept, no recollection; only of standing next to Daud as he was caught in a trance, his eyes unfocused and his spirit wandering from his body. The Outsider had never spoken to her.

And now, soon after she had finally drifted off into sleep, she opened her eyes to a darkness that she had never known but always felt; inside her, whenever she reached for the thread that bonded her to Daud, the seemingly so immutable hold connecting them for so long, that let her partake in his powers in the same breath as naming them her own for all her arrogance and ambition.

Behind her, the Wale lay broken, shipwrecked against the Void rock. It seemed that now, after all that time, the Void was determined to dredge up the past she’d so diligently buried.

She looked ahead, and the Void looked so much as it had in Cienfuegos’ painting that she shuddered. Was it _true_?

There was a path ahead, leading the way across the rock. There was no cloaked figure waiting for her — should she be surprised? It was then that she sensed movement behind her.

_Let me tell you something about the Void, Billie Lurk: it touches the minds of the dreaming and the dying alike. And sometimes, dreams can only tell you what you wanted to forget._

“I don’t dream, and I am neither dead nor dying,” she said lowly, surprised her voice did not tremble. She felt so cold she felt she should shake apart any moment. “You here to offer me your twice-cursed gifts?”

The Outsider, for who else could it, tilted his head at her. _You don’t want my Mark, do you?_

“Pretty sure Corvo didn’t, and you cursed him anyway; you and Daud,” she countered.

 _Everyone who enters a pact with the Void makes a choice,_ the Void god spoke as he weighed his head, his hands clasped behind his back as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, still standing in between her and her ship. He looked exactly like he did in Sokolov’s damned paintings of him. But, she wondered, was this his true form, or was it what she expected to see? He looked like a young man, but surely he couldn’t be. _You have not yet made yours._

“And what do I have to choose between?” she asked, her consciousness grating that she should believe her own eyes; that she was truly in the Void, truly speaking to the black-eyed bastard himself. The one responsible for all the chaos, some would say — the Abbey would. Billie knew better. Precisely because she’d done worse than merely prayed at a shrine to a god that had no concept of, or interest in, her existence. Until now.

 _I was always aware of you,_ the Outsider said as though he’d read her mind.

“What good was your _awareness_ to me twenty years ago?” she challenged. “What good is it now? Why have you brought me here?”

 _You have a destiny greater than this, beyond Karnaca_ , he told her, as if that _meant_ anything.

“Don’t go telling me about my _destiny_ ,“ she hissed, almost forgetting where she was and who she was talking to. “I don’t walk in the shadows of men who have thrown their lives away chasing a dream, chasing power.”

 _And yet, you walk in Daud’s shadow every day,_ the Outsider returned, _for how much you crave his forgiveness, even now._

“I helped him put his daughter back on the throne, didn’t I?”

_And what of his forgotten daughter, the one he raised from nothing? The one he betrayed for love and an honest life?_

“ _I_ have paid my debt to him,” she insisted. And it felt so strange.

 _But wasn’t it Meagan Foster who paid that price?_ The Outsider asked the question as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. _What of Billie Lurk, and her debt?_

All she could do was to stare at him, disbelief and anger warring inside her. She was here. In the Void. A place she had dreamt of, dreaded, heard so much about from Daud, when he could be persuaded to recall his dreams and visions at the shrines. For so long, she’d wanted to see it; in another life. Billie Lurk had once asked Daud what the Outsider smelled like. He’d just given her a look, stepped away from the shrine, cut on his palm still bleeding sluggishly. It’d been one of the last times for a long time; until the Outsider crashed back into Daud’s life, and brought with him an Empress, her daughter, and Corvo.

And now, she had her answer. The Void smelled… cold. She tasted copper on her tongue, the metallic tang of blood and rust; but where rust washed off dark enough to stain the sink, blood always turned back to red. No matter how many years that knife stayed buried.

“What do you _want_ from me?”

 _You have a decision to make, Billie. Do you remember?_ _Do you remember when you followed Daud into the workshop when you were a child; when you betrayed him? When you left your old life behind? All those decisions that you made, and you hid yourself from them for years. And then, you found an Empress out of time, and you decided to help her. I must say, I was impressed._

“I didn’t do it to show off to you,” she rebuked him. That was far from her mind, these days.

 _You refused Emily’s offer of money_ , the Outsider continued, unfazed. _That impressed her, as well._

“I ask again: what do you want from me?”

Finally, the Outsider seemed to have run out of both cryptic shit and patience. _There is something you must know: the Hollows are growing_. _The Void is leaking into the world, and you can no sooner put a stopper on it than death._

“And what does that have to do with me?“ Was it the dreams? The Cienfuegos investigation? Why was he here _now_?

 _You tell me_. And with that, the Outsider vanished.

Billie woke.

* * *

She did not go back to sleep, for fear of the dream, and the Void.

The next day, she went about her business as she always would, doing her best to ignore anything to do with the Void, Cienfuegos and his damned paintings, and the Outsider showing up in her dreams. But the night came, and with it the same shadows that had been haunting her for so long. But she did not dream of losing her arm and eye again. Instead, she dreamt of Deidre, of rats and severed hands that were not her own; of her voice and a different one, that reminded her that there was always another way.

She tore back the covers when she woke that night, her heart racing and her face covered in sweat. She got up and splashed water in her face, hoping to wash away the images and the fear; but they would not go. She looked at herself in the mirror above the basin, and she had to remind herself of who she saw. The haunted past in her eyes, the blood on her cheek. She blinked, and they were gone.

She wondered if this was what Daud had seen, after his return from the Void. The man and the Knife, the same but never quite one. Never quite whole. For so long, she had seen only Meagan Foster. She’d worked hard for it. But she’d gone and dug up Billie Lurk from her grave — and this was the thanks she received?

A destiny, the Outsider had claimed. She had a destiny. But he’d revealed to her a choice as well: whatever this was, she could still walk away from it. It was her past that had led her to this, but it was her future she would consign to it, if she let the Outsider — or the Void — have their way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daud: "Lurk, get in here!"  
> Corvo: *smacks him with a newspaper*  
> the first draft of this also included shushing ;)


	5. Let Me Out of the Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Billie,” Deidre whispered, and then the shadows swallowed her up as if she’d never been there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo kids took a short break from this because writing has been slow; but I see I haven't missed much :P  
> The dialogue I wrote for Billie and Daud in this flippin kills me, and I hope it'll moider you, too, because that's who I am.
> 
> Soundtrack: [Beat the Devil's Tattoo, by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn9C1vKd7Gc&index=96&list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN).

Two days later, Billie still found herself unsettled after her unexpected encounter with the Void — with the Outsider. It had been so long since she’d ever thought He might come for her, speak to her. During the Coup and the _royal family’s_ stay on the Dreadful Wale, the Void and its god had been the bloodox in the room. Billie had known full well that the Outsider had made His presence known shortly after their arrival in Karnaca, and eventually Emily had given up on trying to hide the fact that her powers grew with every passing week. Corvo, too, had not said a word about having his abilities returned, and in the end only Daud had walked away with no more secrets kept than revealed — his own, at least.

That the Outsider should seek her out now was, plainly, proof that they who carried the burden had no need to seek out the world’s derision for it — it would find them on its own. That Cienfuegos had been obsessed with the Void and that the Eyeless were likely involved in his death was, in itself, no sufficient reason. She knew from Daud that cults that worshipped the Outsider — or the gods that came before Him — littered the Empire; and that even the Abbey could not root them out, for all that they’d tried their best. But the Eyeless were a street gang, no more. Or so she’d thought.

Those things the Outsider had said, about Hollows growing, about the Void leaking; that was what concerned her. The Void ‘leaking’ could only be a reference to Aramis’ house. Emily had used similar words, years and months ago. And the Hollows… Void knew what they were. Sometimes Billie herself felt hollow — as empty as the socket of her eye in her dreams. She’d had another one the night before, of wolves chasing her and Deidre waiting for her at the end of an alley; but before she could reach her, a gate slammed down between them. When she turned, there was tooth and claw and death waiting for her, and Deidre behind her did not scream.

“Billie,” she whispered, and then the shadows swallowed her up as if she’d never been there.

Billie needed to get away from all this occult shit, from warnings of Hollows and bleeding Void and Time. She had nightmares because her life had changed, because Emily, much like her father and Daud, never could leave well enough alone; not because she was _special_. Her connection to the Void was gone, it had died with her betrayal. Even her name had never been truly her own — no truer than Meagan Foster, in some ways. So what did it matter if sometimes she’d felt like an imposter? She was.

But now, she had a visit to pay. She had been to see Cristofer at the Gazette the day before, delivering to him proof that Yvan Jacobi had murdered Cienfuegos — and delighted in it, too — and showed no regret beyond not learning more about the Void from his as he breathed his last. The exposé Cristofer had been working on for months would finally be published, quite against the wishes of most stakeholders of the paper, if he and the manic spark in his eyes were to be believed, in the coming days. Perhaps it would do some good.

For her, what remained was to ‘report’ to Corvo and Daud; but more importantly to ask them if they knew anything about that knife she had seen in Jacobi’s office. Something about it had struck her as familiar, aside from the Overseer-like sabre guard, but she could not claim to have ever seen a blade like it in her life. She pondered it more as she took the skiff towards the Palace District. Under her breath, she started humming a tune she had heard the street musicians play in Upper Cyria a few times now. She had never paid much attention to the verses, but she found herself murmuring them now, as if by some compulsion while her mind was chasing the connection between two memories that could hardly be bridged.

“Sharpened on bones… twin blades of bronze…” Her eyes widened.

 _Surely not_.

She cursed. Why were all of these rich people so obsessed with the Void and its unfathomable secrets?

Still, she told herself. That did not mean such a knife existed. It was, most likely, purely fantasy.

* * *

 

“You’ve seen a drawing of a what?” Corvo asked her, coffee cup suspended mid-air. Then, he and Daud exchanged a significant glance.

“A Twin-Bladed Knife. Or, perhaps, _The_ Twin-Bladed Knife. I’ve never heard of one before,” Billie replied, feeling that sinking sensation in her gut that told her that, whatever was coming next, she would not like it one iota. And yet, she handed over the sketch she’d made of it, from memory, over breakfast that morning.

“Oh you’ve heard of one,” Daud was saying now, sitting down on the settee next to Corvo, close enough to touch in a way that he would have never permitted himself in Dunwall. It felt odd to note, especially now, but Billie supposed she was still wrapping her mind around how much he seemed to have loosened up since coming to Karnaca.

“When?” she challenged.

Daud cut her a glance. “Zhukov.”

 _Oh._ Oh no.

“That _creep_ who kidnapped Emily?” She remembered the newspaper headlines that had found their way to Serkonos a few weeks after the fact, of the scandal caused by rumours that the Empress had illicitly attended the infamous Boyle Masquerade Ball — rumours that had been ruthlessly squashed, of course, by her Protector and Spymaster, respectively. But to some of the Empress’ most vocal critics —including Janice Tines, formerly of the Karnaca Gazette and now infamously dead, one of the first victims of the Crown Killer — the mere insinuation had been enough to decry her lack of virtue and respect for the traditions of the Empire that she pretended to govern. Even then, with her past hounding her and her lingering resentment towards Daud for choosing a new family over the one she should have inherited through sheer ambition alone, Billie had gritted her teeth at the malice in those editorials. She needed no telling that she was bitter. She believed that Emily had done her best. It had, simply, not been enough or, perhaps, not the best for the Empire as a whole. The other Isles had demanded their independence (some clamouring more loudly than others), and so it was natural and necessary that the Crown’s focus should lie on Dunwall. But too many issues had gone unresolved for too long — not ignored or neglected, that much credit was due. But Corvo and Daud should’ve been sent into the Palace sooner to pay the real Duke Luca Abele a visit he wouldn’t have soon forgotten.

As it was, everyone was born to be ruler of an Empire years after the war had started; and hindsight was no way of saving lives. Not even with the Outsider’s gifts. Billie thought back to her visit to the Void a few nights ago, and wondered whether she should mention it. She tried to imagine Corvo and Daud’s reactions, but she found herself questioning whether what she imagined was what they were likely to do or what she _wanted_ them to do. What she wanted Daud to do. She remembered their faces when they’d gone to pay the Outsider a visit after Emily had mentioned a ghost in her tower: a boy with black eyes. That had been when Daud had still trusted her enough to tell her such things. Towards the end, even at the Hound Pits pub, his lips had become more and more tightly sealed; until he had shared his secrets only with Corvo. Not to mention his heart.

As she listened to Corvo detail the story of Zhukov and his mirror made of Void, Billie let these thoughts run away with her, tucked away in a corner of her mind that she rarely acknowledged. The part of her that still thought of the Whalers as family, of Dunwall as her home, and of Daud as the one she trusted most in the world not to betray her, through all his faults and flaws and bad choices — that part wanted him to be angry, when she told him. Wanted him to march into the Void and give the Outsider a good piece of his mind.

Ridiculous. She nearly scoffed aloud: she had never come to Daud for reassurance in her _life_. Perhaps he’d given it, in his own way, but rarely to her. Could be he’d sensed she didn’t want it. Could be she wouldn’t have known what kindness was, anyhow. Praise from the Knife of Dunwall had been very rare indeed, and most Whalers had known better than to chase it. In turn, they did not beg forgiveness for mistakes, either. They were taught not to be sorry, but to be better — ‘tough love,’ Fleet had once called it, and the rest of the masters’ dorms had laughed at the idea of Daud feeling so much as a scrap of affection for any of them. All had laughed, except for Billie, Rinaldo, and Rulfio, who had known him longest, at that point, and knew the things he’d done to scrape some of the youngest of the novices out of bathhouses, brothels, gangs, or the Overseers’ clutches. He’d bought their freedom, killed for it; and they had simply stood in the door one day, to be given clothes and food and lessons, while he’d disappeared in his office to do the books. ‘One more damn mouth to feed,’ were words they had _never_ heard out of the Knife of Dunwall.

He’d protected her from those who would hand her over to the City Watch or the Serkonan Guard, from the street gangs who cursed her out and tried to get rid of her. That was true. But as soon as he had given her this blade, and his powers, and the tools to become a Whaler, he had handed the responsibility of staying alive over to her. Billie Lurk did not need anyone’s guardianship. Not then, not now.

In the end, Daud had let his heart rule his head. So had Rinaldo, the day he had nearly given his life to protect Alexi and Emily. So had Thomas, Rulfio and Galia, when they had decided to remain in Dunwall after Daud had been lost, rather than to finally break free. So had all of those who had decided to stay in the first place. And if Daud had simply taken the job, had killed Jessamine as he should have — for she was dead, was she not, albeit not by his blade, so _what good had it done?_ — and if Corvo had come after them all with the wrath of an angry god inside him, they would have all fallen to his sword to protect Daud, had it come to it.

Were all Daud’s children doomed to make the same mistakes as he?

She would be a fool to tell him.

“We never found his body,” Corvo concluded his tale.

“Nor that knife,” Daud added, his gaze on Billie sharp as though he knew that she’d been barely listening. But she’d caught enough.

“It gave him powers,” she said, “but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

Daud cut her another glance, then looked to Corvo, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

“There’s a story of a knife,“ he began. “It’s also the story of a cult. There are countless cults dedicated to worshipping the Outsider or some other, forgotten deity of the Void, all over the Isles. Before he marked me, I travelled from isle to isle and city to city to find his shrines, and the more places I saw and the more people I met, the more I endeavoured to find out as much about those cults as I could. He encouraged me, and it seemed strange how jealously he guarded some secrets while freely directing me towards others. But then, it wasn’t always his secrets I was uncovering. Apart from one.

“There is a tale of a weapon that can kill the Outsider. Some believe that the Abbey forged it in a quest to one day break his hold on the Void. Others say that it’s far older than that, an ancient relic from before the time of the Great Burning; used to murder dozens of gods before him. It took us a while, after Zhukov, to realise that the blade he carried might have been that knife. We did not understand the connection at the time, and more so the weapon to kill a god seemed nothing but a myth. No-one had ever seen it. Until that day.“

“And since neither his body, nor the knife, nor the mirror could be recovered, we decided that no-one ever would again,” Corvo took up the thread. “This,” he gestured at Billie’s sketch, “what you saw in Jacobi’s office, it’s just a drawing.”

“That is what we hope,” Daud said with a sidelong look at his partner that seemed unchanged from the looks he’d thrown him fifteen years ago in a rundown pub at the edge of the river. “How are we to know they don’t have it? Zhukov didn’t burn, he didn’t turn to ash, he _disappeared_. There was no trace of him.“

“Is there any information on how Zhukov came to be in possession of the knife?” Billie interrupted.

Corvo nodded. “He kept a diary. It turns to gibberish more and more the closer his entries come to the Ball and everything that came after, but his account of how he escaped Utyrka is very clear, if fantastical.”

“Could I read it?” Billie asked. “Do you still have it?“

“It’s in our private library back in Dunwall,“ Daud said. “We didn’t take everything with us. I can write Thomas to have it sent, but that would take a month, all told.”

Billie nodded. That might hardly be worth the effort, if it all turned out to be nothing. “What if the knife is real? And what if they have it?“

“If they have it, we need to take it from them,” Daud answered immediately, surprising her. “They can’t be allowed to keep it.“

“But we can?“ Billie challenged. “What do you want with it, Daud?” Was there enough rage in him, she briefly wondered. Enough bitterness?

“I don’t want to kill the Outsider,” he grated, “if that’s what you mean.”

Beside him, Corvo cleared his throat, but they were not yet done with one another.

“So you’re protecting _him_?”

“I’m protecting the Empire. And that includes _you_.”

Funny, Billie thought, how words worked just as well as knives if one knew how to wield the sharpest of their edges. The truth was just another blade, and there was blood dripping off the tip.

“I’ll make more coffee,” Corvo announced with an air of someone who knew better than to offer their perspective, and got up, pointedly using one of Daud’s knees to leverage himself upright. Had she the mind for it, Billie might have wondered how precisely she had managed to stumble into this domestic comedy with the two most feared assassins in the Isles. While he disappeared into the kitchen, she and Daud sat in silence.

She returned to the Dreadful Wale later that afternoon with thoughts of secrets and things unsaid heavy in her mind. She carried them around with her until she finally found rest, late into the night.

*

_Every night for weeks, the same terrifying dream. A street fight, my arm dead and lying in the gutter. My eye gouged out by a Grand Guard sword. But when I wake up, they still hurt for hours. Gives me the creeps._

_Daud is not the man he was. I don’t know what I was hoping for when I followed him that night, but he shared his strange magic with me, and more than that, his skill, his time, his trust, and sometimes his secrets. But things changed, and so did we. Now, I know he’s got regrets as sharp as mine; and still we argue over what to do. I know how much that carves you up inside. There is no way we can make up for a lifetime of sins — not even by killing a god. The Abbey teaches us that the Outsider preys on weakness. That the Void is the source of doubt, heresy, and suffering. That the Outsider is to blame for all our ills. Who knows. Maybe they’re right._

This, she wrote in her diary before going to sleep. She had barely closed her eyes and drifted off when, once _again_ , she found herself in the Void. She groaned. But then, she supposed she’d known this was coming.

“A choice,” she called into nothing, merely _assuming_ that He was listening. Daud used to say that He was always watching. “What kind of choice?” There was no answer. She started walking. “If it’s not your Mark, then what am I supposed to choose?“ Still, only silence. The Void shifted before her as she kept moving.

 _The Void_ , a voice suddenly whispered in her ear, and she whirled around. The Outsider was hovering before her.

“The Void?”

 _Your dreams_ , he continued. _They’ve been worsening._

“Thanks to you,“ Billie growled. To her surprise, he frowned.

_You think the dreams are my doing?_

“You expect me to believe they’re not?“

He tilted his head. _A thousand lives, a thousand choices, all converged on one wounded body, one wounded mind. Your mind, Billie Lurk. I am not the master of the Void. If I were, I could make it stop._

“Stop what?“

_All the old boundaries are falling apart. Between the living and the dead, the real and the forgotten. You’ve watched them crumbling. You were there, you were… altered. You can see, if you choose to._

Billie scowled, confused.

_Time's bleeding all around you._

“Then how do I make it stop?”

 _You can’t. I can’t. I can’t stop the dreams, and I can’t unmake the past. I cannot return what you did not lose._ He gestured at her arm, her face.

“Then what _can_ you do?”

 _Unravel the thread,_ he said. _Give you sight, so you may see, and give you reach beyond this world_. _Your world._

When she stared at him, uncomprehending and not a bit impressed by his mysticism, his shoulders dropped.

_Gifts, Billie. Gifts from the Void._

“A new eye,” she guessed. “A new arm.”

 _The eye, yes_ , he said. _An artefact, a sliver of the Eye of the Dead God. Your arm… it both exists and does not. You do not see it as I do._

“What do you see?” she asked, and she daresay she did not want to hear the answer.

_Let me show you._

He reached out as if to touch her, and she reared back. He waited. Did a god know patience? Hesitantly, she held out her hand, and nodded. He had barely touched her when her arm went cold, and before her eyes her coat, her skin and her flesh turned to nothing; and left behind only shards of bone and Void. She gasped, and yanked her arm away, wrapping the fingers of her left around her wrist, making sure that what _her_ eyes saw, she could still feel.

“And you would reduce me to this?” she demanded.

 _The Void is scrabbling at your mind_ , he told her, and for a moment he even seemed sorry. _It demands you let it enter. But you do not have to. What I offer… is a way to do it. The dreams will stop, and you will be made whole again_.

“I will be _disfigured!_ ”

_Only to those touched by the Void. They will know what you are._

“So will I! And I will be bound to you, which is the last thing I ever wanted.” (Liar, she thought.)

_Not to me. To the Void. It needs… it needs you to see._

“And what if I don’t give a damn what the _Void_ needs from me?” (Liar.)

_There is another way._

This took her by surprise. Wasn’t destiny supposed to be inevitable?

_Do you remember the Oraculum? The device Breanna Ashworth and Kirin Jindosh built, together, to guide the prophecies of the Oracular Order?_

“Yes. Emily used it to sever Ashworth’s connection to the—” she stopped, and stared at him. “I could use it?”

 _It still sits in the Conservatory, which is still sealed, on the order of Her Majesty and the High Overseer in Dunwall_.

“And I could use it to shut out the Void? Completely?”

_Yes._

“And what of my destiny?”

_You would still be able to do what you’re planning now. It might be more difficult, but I do not believe that’s ever stopped you._

She studied him, regarded him as sharply as she knew how; although she knew it was foolish to try and make the god of the Void _nervous_. Still, she had a hunch. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me. Something you’re _hoping_ I’ll do.”

The Outsider remained silent.

“Don’t lie to me.”

 _I’ve never lied to you_.

“No, you’ve just let me fend for myself for forty years.”

_I won’t lie to you, Billie Lurk. I do not lie. I see the future, but it is never just the one version of it. There are many different ways this world could go howling into the Void; and some ways it can be saved. I do not know which path it will take — which path you will take._

“To save the world?“ Billie asked drily.

The Outsider regarded her with an expression that made it clear he knew he had said too much.

 _Nothing is set in stone_. And with that, he vanished.

Billie was certain that that, right there, had been a lie.

* * *

 

She would be a fool to tell him, Billie remembered thinking just the day before.

She _was_ a fool to tell him, she knew when she rapped her knuckles against their door, twice in as many days. It was barely seven, and Corvo looked as creased as he’d ever done after a bad night’s sleep on the Wale when he opened the door.

“Billie?” he asked, as if uncertain.

At least he was dressed.

At her impatient gesture, he stepped aside to let her in, and she found her way, somewhat impolitely — not that she had ever given a rat’s tail about _manners_ in her life — towards the living room first, from where she could hear sounds of clinking dishes and a newspaper being picked apart. She rounded the corner, coming up on Daud sitting at a smallish, round table. He stopped in stirring his coffee when he saw her there, and she idly observed that he needed a shave more presently than Corvo.

“What’s wrong?” It was all he said, all he asked. He put the newspaper down, folding his hands over it, and looked at her expectantly.

Now that she was here, staring at him, Corvo hovering in the hallway behind her, uncertain whether his entrance into this conversation would be an intrusion, she had not the words to tell him. On the entire journey here, she had refused to make them up, to practise, to make more palatable the ugly truth.

So now, she just said it. What choice did she have?

“I had a visit,” she began, and didn’t it always sound just so innocuous. “From the Outsider.”

Daud’s eyes went cold.

For a long moment, neither of them said something.

“You can’t seriously be considering it.”

“You don’t know what he’s offered me. _If_ he offered me anything.”

“I know what he’s _like_. There’s always a price. And too often it’s too late by the time you realise that it’s already been paid.”

Was he trying to protect her? Or were they fighting over the repetition of bad choices? The Void had played a part in every single thing they’d ever done to hurt each other.

“You don’t _know_ that. You don’t know everything, Daud.”

“I know better than you.”

“How dare you,” she hissed. “You let _Emily_ be marked without a fight.” And it wasn’t envy: it was the opposite. It wasn’t that he’d let the Empress do it. It was, ‘ _You’re supposed to love her more than me_.’ Unless it wasn’t that at all. Unless it was that he trusted Emily more to keep her head on right. Unless it was that he expected Billie to _know better_. “You have no idea—”

“Who you are?” he cut her off. “Don’t be so sure.”

There was movement behind her.

“Lurk?” Corvo was nowhere to be seen, but Cottings stood in the corridor behind her. “Is everything alright?”

“I was just leaving,” Billie announced abruptly, quite before she’d made up her mind to do so, and turned on her heel. She stormed past Cottings, past the study, where Corvo was sorting reports and certainly not eavesdropping, and towards the door.

“Wait!” Cottings called after her. “Lurk!”

* * *

 

Once outside, Billie barely stopped for anything, but eventually Cottings caught up with her, although she had wisely ceased calling her name out in the open road.

“Please, slow down.”

Eventually, she did, and turned to let Cottings catch up.

“Cottings—”

“Martha,” the officer insisted, for the first time, perhaps surprising herself as well, and Billie sighed.

“Martha.” She looked at her sideways, then let her eyes dart away. “It’s not wise for you to be seen with me.”

“I decide what’s wise for me,” she returned, concern and determination in her gaze, unwavering on Billie’s face. “If you’d rather not have me along in Upper Cyria, alright. But these are my streets, I walk them every day. I’ll be seen with who I please,” she ended, and only then did a fraction of doubt enter her eyes, as if she feared she’d overstepped a boundary — either Billie’s, or her own, in revealing more than she meant to. Albeit what, Billie could not say, except perchance her stubbornness. And that, Billie considered, she’d already known about her.

“Fine,” she found herself saying, giving in rather too quickly, mainly for the curious way passers-by were glancing at them from the side.

“Here, you’re with me,” Cottings — Martha — said. “Not the other way around. And besides: you really think I’m scared of a few gang members obsessed with death?”

“More than death,“ Billie argued. “The Void. It’s not a place you forget.” They were Daud’s words first, but Billie found herself repeating them for want of something else to say. Late one night a long time ago, Daud had answered her many questions a different way: ‘It feels as if you called for help, and no one answered.’

“Speaking from experience?” Martha’s voice was pitched a little lower, as if to prevent their conversation being overheard, but her eyes were keen, and far too curious.

Billie didn’t answer.

“It’s the only thing I can imagine Daud getting so riled up about. Or you,“ Martha continued. When Billie still did not speak, she shrugged. “In any case, we’ve left him in Corvo’s capable hands.”

The street ahead of them was nearly clear. It was so early, the merchants were still setting up shop for the day, and Guard patrols had not yet relieved the night shift.

“Where should we go?“ Martha asked now. She seemed determined to carry the conversation for as long as Billie was going to be taciturn; or until she told her to leave. Billie found herself dismissing the thought — far too quickly, and without rightly knowing why. They barely knew each other. Knowing that Cottings had the trust of the entire royal family was not hard currency these days, she thought cynically. Perhaps it was instinct, perhaps it was the sheer novelty of meeting someone so much like and yet unlike her that she could not help feeling intrigued. It was strange, to hear someone mention the Void so casually who was not inextricably entangled with it — someone who had not forfeit their life to it, wittingly or without understanding. Billie could hardly believe that Corvo and Daud had let so many in on their secret, and yet it still seemed to remain one — and not a secret of the kind that Corvo and Jessamine’s relationship had been. Alexi Mayhew, Wyman, Cottings, Simmons, the Curnows… so many people knew. So many people who did not bat an eye when a former Whaler appeared out of thin air and fell into step with them. _Billie_ had nearly jumped when it had happened the first time when she was back in Dunwall, and she had been trapped on a damned boat with three of the most casual and proficient magic users in the Isles for months.

“Somewhere the old man can’t hit me in the back with a sleep dart,” she growled, fully intending to leave up to interpretation whether she was being serious or not. Martha sent her a speculative glance but started walking nonetheless.

They continued on down the main avenue until they turned left, towards the markets at the edge of the district. The streets there were more lively, and they would be easily swallowed up by the crowds. Fishmongers did not care about a smuggler and a Grand Guard soldier strolling side by side — or so she hoped.

“What else did you find in the Dust District?” Billie decided to ask the question that had been lingering at the back of her mind since their first reacquaintance. She herself had of course been in contact with Aramis, but she wanted to hear an outsider’s perspective. And, she supposed, she wanted to hear Cottings’ perspective as well.

Her companion cast her another look that suggested, plainly, that she was being transparently evasive of the original subject — but evidently, she did not mind enough to call her on it, and instead lifted her shoulders in an eloquent shrug.

“The gamble played off, apparently,” she said. “Paolo and Byrne have not yet garrotted each other, and with Byrne increasingly receiving assignments and orders from Dunwall and the High Overseer, I guess he’d be too busy to try anyhow. Paolo and his Howlers have crawled back into their little rat holes, but their influence over the district is still palpable. People cannot yet quite believe that the streets might actually be safe again, especially at night. But as the district gets cleaned up, workers and their families move back in… it’s much more alive now than it was.”

“And then, it’ll only be a question of time until the rich return as well and rent goes up again,” Billie returned sarcastically. When Martha raised her brows questioningly, it was her turn to shrug. “When Stilton owned the mines, it was thanks to him that Batista and the surrounding districts flourished. After a while, not only the miners and their families came to live there, and those who arrived brought more money with them. Not everyone was happy about it.”

Martha nodded. “No-one wants a second Upper Cyria — except those who can afford to live in Upper Cyria. Everyone who just works there goes back to the Dust District or Lower Aventa at the end of the day.”

“If they’re going back to Lower Aventa, it’s not because they can afford to live there, either,” Billie reminded her. She recalled that Cottings was from the outskirts of Cullero, which was similar enough to Karnaca in all these things; but Cottings still had some history to learn if she wanted to truly understand Karnaca. It had taken Billie a while, as well. “Upper Cyria is…”

“Creepy?” Martha supplied. “I’ve only been there once. The announcements alone made me want to leave immediately.”

“‘Our community is our pride,’” Billie mocked the voice she had heard so often during her visits to the district. She knew she would likely have to return a few more times to conclude her business with the Eyeless and to ascertain how much they knew about the Void and that mystical weapon, and if they had it, but she did not relish the prospect. It was the same as when every other assignment Daud had ever given her had led her to the Legal District to spy on some barrister or other. No sooner had they dispatched one than the next took their place; so quickly as to make Billie suspect they were producing them in factories next to the slaughterhouses.

Walking next to her, Martha laughed, even as she shuddered. “Do that again!”

“What?” Billie asked, bemused.

“Say something in that voice,” Martha begged. “Anything! It’s perfectly horrible.”

“Didn’t have you pegged for that kind of thing,” Billie couldn’t help saying, catching herself out in a smirk when Martha grinned at her. It was gratifying, she supposed, to see a person usually so composed let down her guard just a little. She shook her head — now was not the time. Nor the place. So she didn’t say anything else, merely walked on, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Martha shrug a little.

“I enjoyed our conversations at Dunwall Tower,” Martha said eventually, as they passed a bakery where they were just putting the glaze on the bread, making everyone who walked past breathe deeper in appreciation. Billie took a moment to try and see if she might identify the spices. Martha watched her, still smiling quietly.

Finally, Billie drew a breath not to steal a baker’s secrets but to answer her:

“Even though the name I gave you was a lie?” It was curious, how it almost _bothered_ her that Cottings had seemed so little surprised at finding out who Billie truly was — and who Meagan Foster wasn’t. What had she expected, then? The sensible answer, of course, was that she hadn’t expected anything, because it wasn’t any of Cottings’ business.

“That was your prerogative,” Martha answered, interrupting her meandering thoughts on the subject. “No matter where we leave, no matter where we go to, we always end up becoming someone else. You changed your name, too. That’s nothing strange.”

Billie cut her a glance. “You _know_ why I did it. Why I _had to_.“

“I do. I know who Billie Lurk… used to be. I work for the man who trained her; which I would have never believed possible. Nor that Corvo...” She trailed off.

“Would fall in love with an assassin? _The_ assassin?” Billie challenged.

Martha averted her eyes for but a second, then looked back at her. “Not that. Love is… what it is. But that he would keep such a secret for so long, that he would take _such_ a risk. It’s not strange to me anymore now, knowing what they are to each other, but I could scarcely believe it at first. That was more of a shock to me than finding the Knife of Dunwall still alive and in Dunwall, and in service of the Crown.”

“Love is what it is,” Billie said quietly. She supposed it savoured strongly of bitterness. Giving Martha no time to reply, she added, “Do you know why I left Dunwall back then?”

“No,” Martha shook her head. Billie searched her face for deceit, for pretend ignorance. “It was hardly talked about, but I simply imagined you had left with some of the other Whalers.” She paused, then said: “And if there’s a different story, I won’t demand to hear it. Neither from you, nor from anyone else.”

Billie clenched her teeth. They were getting closer to the docks, and the streets were getting busier.

“People are always curious,” she told her. _Always prying open things they shouldn’t,_ she thought. _Just look at me_.

“Curiosity is no reason to betray someone else’s trust.” There was a shadow of doubt in Martha’s voice now. Hurt, perhaps, that Billie would think of her as she did of all other people. People did not all deserve trust.

“So ask me,” Billie prompted, before she’d quite made up her mind to do it. “Ask me why.”

Beside her, Martha stopped walking, frowning at her now. She knew, of course, what Billie meant for her to ask. Whether she might receive an answer… Billie found it troublesome to single out the certainty of what she _wanted_ to say from among the mess of other things she felt. Wherever she’d gone in Dunwall, people had already known her story, or presumed to know it. Then, Meagan Foster had done her best to bury it. And now, Billie Lurk lived with an open secret that scabbed like a wound. Perhaps it was foolish to believe that telling _someone_ might help. Or perhaps it might just make her lonelier than ever. But there was that insistence in her heart, if indeed that was the part of her that yearned, if indeed it still worked, that Martha needed to know this about her if there was to be any trust between. Any other hope was solely Billie’s own, and she knew that, too. But before, there stood cold, weightless anticipation in her path.

Martha looked away, up the street, biting her lip. Billie stood, waiting.

When Martha turned back, she said, “Why did you come back, Billie Lurk?”

One of the steel bands around Billie’s chest gently snapped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) And because I make absolutely no effort to keep my politics out of video games or fic: GENTRIFICATION SUCKS, PEOPLE  
> Upper Cyria is the Stepford of Dishonored and I hate it.  
> b) credit for "cold, weightless feeling of anticipation" goes to thewickedkat!


	6. I Struggled with Some Demons, They Were Middle Class and Tame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But such as it was, there was little Daud could — or would — do to deter her, from whatever course of action she might choose. He might argue with her, perhaps even plead, if he thought her life worthy of wounding his own mortal pride, but he would not command her. He knew that would be foolish to attempt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Billie has a choice to make — for better or for worse.
> 
> Soundtrack: [Hunt You Down, by Hit House](https://youtu.be/6f3j4okhb8o?list=PLY1Uwm5rZ4zOVXyBOsEZlCATCUdaVFWrN).

Billie returned to Corvo and Daud’s door a few days later, regardless of what Daud might say, or think, or do — except, what would he, really? He had never taken to chaining his Whalers up to keep them from making mistakes; even the ones everyone could see coming a mile off. Unless they were likely to get themselves captured, killed, or seriously injured, he did not tell them how to pull jobs or fulfil their contracts once they were out of initiation and novice training. If he trusted them to hold their own on the streets of Dunwall, they were responsible for their own screw-ups — and, in all fairness, of those there had been plenty.

But such as it was, there was little Daud could — or would — do to deter her, from whatever course of action she might choose. He might argue with her, perhaps even plead, if he thought her life worthy of wounding his own mortal pride, but he would not command her. He knew that would be foolish to attempt.

This she contemplated before knocking on the door, knowing that it would be Daud or Corvo themselves who answered, not Martha. She was out in the city today, joining patrols in the Aventa Districts. They had spent the remainder of the afternoon together that day, after Billie’s first angry — meaning: curt and cold-hearted —confrontation with Daud. Billie had told her only _some_ , not all. About the Eyeless, about her life as Meagan Foster — the lie she’d lived for so long, first and foremost deceiving herself. Martha had been determined to insist that she’d done it to protect herself and others, and Billie might have taken her up on the invitation if the _reasons_ for her leaving Dunwall hadn’t been what they were.

That part, Martha still did not know — she’d not asked it. And for that, Billie was grateful, even as she shouldn’t be. Billie Lurk’s return to go up against the Eyeless made her out to be a hero, or close to it, and if there was one thing she was not… She’d tried to express her reticence, not in as many words, but Martha had looked at her from the side.

“If Daud can have his cake and eat it, too, who says you cannot? No matter what it says on the wanted posters for your name.”

How was she to tell her that the worst thing she’d ever done was too despicable to be assigned a reward for her head? So she’d said nothing, and Martha had smiled as if she’d won. Why there was any sense in winning, Billie did not know.

And at that moment, the door opened.

“Billie,” Daud greeted her, his brow furrowed and his gaze skittish, as though her arrival had just torn him out of becoming thoroughly annoyed at one thing and had now given him something else to find disapprobation in. Well. She lived to serve at other people’s displeasure, did she not. “Come in.”

 _Ah,_ she thought. _Manners._

She followed him into the study, where Corvo was already seated at one of the desks. Billie noted with faint wonder that he had finally given in and had taken to wearing reading glasses — something he had yet refused to do while on board of the Dreadful Wale, where she had caught him more than once squinting at the newspaper clippings pinned to the board in the main room. Both Daud and Emily had seemed to have given up on saying anything. Hypatia had one day — gently — suggested reading glasses, and the normally so unflappable Royal Protector had sent her such an impertinent look that she had quickly turned back to her breakfast, hiding her increasing amusement at the vanity of middle-aged men behind her coffee cup.

“Billie,” Corvo greeted her affably, and she did not miss the slight glare he sent in Daud’s direction — just on the off-chance he’d been rude, she supposed.

“Have you decided yet?” Daud asked without preamble, and Corvo’s gaze sharpened. _So long, manners_ , Billie thought to herself drily.

“Not yet,” she answered plainly. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

Corvo’s disapproving look turned to her.

“You shouldn’t have any _business_ with the Void, Billie. You know what it does.”

And back to Daud.

“Says the one who has carried this Mark for forty years,” she reminded him, somewhat forcefully. “He hasn’t offered to mark me, Daud. But there are things the Void can give me—sight. A different reach.”

“What has the black-eyed bastard promised you?” Daud growled.

“Nothing. He has _promised_ me nothing.”

Daud’s jaw worked, as if chewing on the words he would not allow himself to say — out of stubbornness, or out of respect for her, who could say. When he drew breath to speak, she expected all of those things anyway, but instead he said:

“I—we need you to track down the Knife. If the Eyeless really have it, they can’t be allowed to keep it. Wherever it is, whatever connection they have to it, it must be severed. We’re not yet sure what to do with it once you’ve taken it, but there must be a way of destroying it, or hiding it so as can’t be found.”

“And then we’ll be dead, and someone _will_ find it,” Billie said. “Or do you plan on holding Emily’s children responsible for it, if she decides to have or name an heir? There’s no hiding these things forever, you know that. The Knife was found before, it will be found again. Whoever buried it in Utyrka might have meant well, but they still failed, if hiding it from the world forever _was_ their intent.”

“The fact remains that we cannot leave it in their hands, if it’s really here,” Corvo interjected. “You’re right about the wisdom of burying it, but perhaps then we _should_ destroy it.”

“If we can,” Billie countered.

“It was forged,“ Daud said. “It can be melted down.”

 _Pretty words_ , Billie thought to herself. But what kind of fire might be needed to unmake something touched by the Void? Forged by human hands or no, Billie had no doubt that this was no ordinary blade, and Corvo and Daud’s recollections of Zhukov’s ramblings and ravings certainly suggested it. The Void was no volcano, that was for certain, there was no fiery pit for her to sink the Knife into.

“So where do I start?“ she asked. “Jacobi shares a safety deposit box with Shan Yun, perhaps they’ve hidden Eyeless documents in there. Dolores Michaels was on the tattoo artist’s client list, too, and she owns and controls the bank.”

“Shared,” Corvo dropped into the conversation. At Billie’s quizzical look, he handed her the morning issue of the Gazette. “He’s dead.”

Incredulous, Billie searched the front page below the fold until she found the item in question. “Found dead in his apartment,” she read aloud. “Grand Guard suspects suicide by an overdose of Plagued Spirit. Shit,” she cursed. “What a way to go, having that vile stuff forced down your throat.”

“Quite,” Daud agreed. “The exposé you helped Jeorge assemble was published two days ago, and today he’s dead. The Eyeless are quick at cleaning up after themselves.”

“They learnt from Cienfuegos,” Billie murmured darkly. She read the rest of the article, also written by Jeorge. He questioned the Grand Guard’s assessment of suicide, and further acknowledged his own part in not sharing his information with the Guard in perhaps failing to save Jacobi from his fate. The implicit hamstring there, of course, was that he would have had to find a Grand Guard officer he could trust. Billie’s thoughts flitted to Martha — should she have brought her in on this, after all? Of course, Jacobi might have simply refused protective custody, believing himself untouchable. But they hadn’t even tried. She wouldn’t mourn him — the man had been a pig and a murderer. But there was moral judgement, and there was culpability; and both tended to leave her on unsteady footing.

“So it’s likely they’ve given Jacobi’s key to someone else,” Corvo said. “And the vault might be a dead end, anyhow.”

Daud weighed his head. “It’s the most secure vault in Serkonos, or perhaps the Isles,” he said. “Another Jindosh invention.” Suddenly, there was a glint in his eye, one that Billie recognised from times long past and that usually spelt something dangerously close to what others might call ‘mischief.’ “I wonder whether our dearly departed Grand Inventor might turn in his grave if he knew that someone broke it.”

“So which is it,” Billie challenged. “Steal a knife, or sabotage a bank?“

Daud shrugged, that same expression still in his eye. “Why can’t it be both?”

* * *

 

The remainder of the day was spent gathering what plans they had of Upper Cyria and the area surrounding the bank. Everyone connected to the Eyeless seemed to live only a stone’s throw away — certainly no coincidence. If Jacobi had not received his key before his demise, it was likely enough that the bank might have kept it; it might even be under the guard of Dolores Michaels herself. Billie had no doubt that she had ordered Jacobi killed, for lack of someone else to blame. As much as Billie had endeavoured to pry into the gang’s business, there was precious little to be gleaned about the people behind all of it. Dolores Michaels was surely not at the top of the food chain… but then who _was_ pulling the strings?

That night, Billie returned to the repair station and the Wale, and sat on deck nursing a glass of whiskey for a long time. A weapon that might kill the Outsider… did he know? Was this why he had sought her out in the first place? Would he seek to bind her to him, for fear of his own… well. Could one call it life? Godhood, then. Was he frightened? Could he feel fear? Or was he simply loathe to relinquish his power?

It was time to demand answers, she found. From Daud she had learnt that the Mark was not the blessing of an avenging angel, but the dreadful possibility of change.

But the Outsider had not offered her his Mark, had he.

*

Perhaps she had simply known he would come, perhaps she’d willed it in the moments before she finally fell asleep. There was little to be gained from _wishing_ for the Void, she thought, but here she was, back in the cold. Was there justice in this, she wondered, in demanding her questions answered — questions, she knew, that would send her towards answers she may wish she didn’t have, after. Answers that might influence her decision — answers that would have her wonder whether it was this that the Outsider had done his best to avoid by not telling her. If his motives were, indeed, so intricate.

When the Outsider appeared next to her, at a precipice overlooking the Void, stark and strangely barren, he didn’t speak. She wondered if it was sick; the Void. Whether Delilah’s escape had… done something to it. Something not even the Outsider could reverse. Or, perhaps, he didn’t want to.

“Tell me truth,” she said quietly. “Tell me what I need to know.”

_Are you sure?_

“Tell me.” She turned to look at him. “Don’t I deserve to?”

He turned to her, his hands clasped behind his back. For a moment, his eyes seemed to go even darker, even deeper, as black as the heart of the Void itself. She blinked, and when she opened her eyes again, the Void around them had changed. It felt even older, now. Even colder.

 _Look around you, a crumbling island at the very edges of the Void. But this one is special._ The Outsider gave her what might almost be a smile, almost sad and knowing, and turned from her again. His hands still behind his back, he started walking — something she’d rarely seem him do. He seemed far too fond of appearing wherever he liked without warning and boundary. Curious, she followed him, until he stopped again, looking ahead. Annoyingly, he was taller than her and the path narrow, and when she leaned around him to see, she could only see hooded figures, made of stone, but nothing more.

 _It's the place where my throat was cut, four thousand years ago. This is where my life ended and where it began again. It's where they made me._ He spoke softly, reminiscently.

Billie’s eyes snapped back to him. Where they _made_ him?

Slowly, he resumed his leisurely pace, leading her along the path closer towards the centre of the island.

_Right up until the end I thought I'd find a way to escape._

Abruptly, the path opened, the Outsider stepped aside, and Billie found what he meant to show her. A sacrificial altar, with one of the hooded figures at the top of a slab, holding a knife. Billie stepped closer, but she wouldn’t have needed to to recognise it. It was the same knife she’d seen in that drawing, the same knife Daud and Corvo had described to her and that sent the Hero of Tyvia into madness, chasing time that had been lost and the Outsider’s powers.

 _I fought but the ropes only cut my skin so I went limp. And then the knife touched my throat and I knew I'd waited too long. The blood ran out and I became a god._ The Outsider came to stand beside her.

“They made you,“ she whispered hoarsely. “With that knife.”

 _Born in the Month of Darkness_ , he said. _Of twin blades of bronze, sharpened on bones._

The song, she realised. _Before the Great Burning_.

“A boy with no shoes.” Why that line stood out to her just then, she could not say.

_It might have been true. I cannot remember very well._

“Why are you showing me this? So I will pity you? So I’ll leave the Knife where it is?” she challenged. “Daud says it can be used to kill you.“

 _Are you coming to kill me, Billie Lurk?_ he asked her plainly.

“Should I?” Her thoughts were racing. If this was the knife… if she was going to hold it in her hands… would it drive her mad as it did Zhukov? Or would it send her to do other things?

 _Perhaps you should ask Daud that question_ , the Void god replied.

“Already have.”

_And what was his answer?_

“You still owe me yours.“ She thought for a moment. Something about this place… called to her. There was something in the stone beneath her feet, something in the air that wasn’t air around her… something that reminded her so strongly of Stilton Manor, of the night Emily had suddenly appeared beside her; the cold Void thrumming through Aramis’ study and through the entire house. It tugged at her, just as the Void had done ever since time had changed. “Did Delilah know about this? Is this how she thought to make herself immortal? Is this how she could?”

The Outsider, to her surprise, nodded.

_Now you know Delilah's secret. At the end of her days, she drifted through the Void and should have been lost forever. But her will and cunning are second to none. She found this place, the island in the Void where I became what I am. It changed her and she discovered a way to draw from it, tapping into the power here. Delilah was… a part of me, for a long time. And I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do._

Billie waved a hand at the hooded figures. “Who were they? Why did they do this?”

_The first cultists sacrificed the boy because they realised the Void was without a god; and to fix that, not comprehending that the Void would have been fine if left alone, they set about sacrificing someone to be its deity — their deity, their worship. Their prisoner, too; after all, they made him, and they might undo him. They took the boy into the Void, and on the island with the altar (encircled by stones, with an ancient tree), they cut his throat. Slowly bleeding out, they dragged him into the_ _Ri_ _tual_ _H_ _old, where the Void took_ _possession_ _of him. He became one with it, merged with the stone, opened his eyes and, realising what had happened to him, tried to scream. When I died, the world was remade. And they had created godhood._

Billie’s vision swam for a moment. “They _created_ a god. But they were human?”

 _Inexorably so._ The expression on the Outsider’s face was… pained.

“And the Void accepted you?”

_It hungers. It needn’t have, but it took what it was given._

“Why are you showing me this?” she insisted one more time.

 _There is a mystery at the heart of all this_ , he said. _It’s yours to unravel. If you want it._

“And if I choose not to?”

_Then that is as it shall remain._

“You mentioned saving the world,” she accused.

 _I said too much_.

“You think I’ll let it go howling into the Void?”

 _I think you do not owe it recompense_ _,_ he answered, surprisingly sharply. _Someone might as well. When the cult sacrificed me, they did more than make their own god. They took that decision away from the Void. For four thousand years, I was able to contain the consequences, but not any longer. Delilah tore open the rift when she escaped, and I can no longer hold it all together. I had barely enough_ _control_ _to share the Void with Emily, and to unmask Corvo’s powers after Delilah buried them inside him. Another connection… is impossible._

“What about you?”

_What about me?_

“I’ve seen what it does to people to tangle with you. But if you’re not going to mark me, why are you here? You know, I used to wonder if you’d speak to me. I almost wanted it. Every street kid, every desperate wretch pushed to the edge. They all wanted you to speak to them. Why didn’t you? All this time, you never cared. Why me, now?”

 _People usually want something from me… and no matter how much they take, it is never enough. But you don’t want my Mark, do you? Not anymore._ For a long moment, he was silent. Then, he said, _Perhaps it’s time_.

The words to answer stuck in her throat. What if the way to end this... was through him? She knew better than to blame him, for all that she resented his choice of those he granted favour. Daud had spent many nights furiously researching, especially after the Outsider had abandoned him. He'd meant to hold him responsible — but when looking into the Void, they all knew that no-one was to hold to account for their sins and faults but themselves. And now here he was, offering... help?

_I can return to you something you lost. Your arm, your eye. Not as they were, but close enough. Close enough to stop the nightmares._

“And the catch?”

_They are gifts from the Void, and as such, they will behave that way. They will give you powers, but it will be obvious to anybody touched by the Void that they are not… of this world. Your world._

“So I will be marked,” she murmured. “In more ways than one.”

_You were always remarkable, Billie Lurk._

“Don’t flatter.”

 _You don’t have to decide now_ , he said, but Billie’d already squared her shoulders and jutted out her chin.

“Do it,” she said. “Do it. The Void could swallow us up any day. I’m not waiting.”

_What about Daud?_

She glowered at him. “And I’m sure as shit not asking for permission.”

 _Alright, then, Billie Lurk_ , he said, and to her surprise held out his hand. _Let’s start with your arm. It will hurt,_ he warned her.

“Can’t be worse than the dreams,” she muttered. She didn’t think he’d want her to take his hand, so she stretched out her arm towards him, letting her palm hover above his. He nodded, and then reached out to wrap his fingers, lithe and cold even through the leather of her coat, around her wrist. She felt the same pinpricks and needles as when he’d first shown her, starting in her fingertips and then moving up towards her elbow. Before her eyes, skin gave way to flesh to sinew to Void, until she could see the bone shatter. It was horrifying, fascinating in a troubling way. But then, a leather belt and splint formed at her elbow, and new bone grew as if by magic; but it wasn’t magic, it was Void itself. Shards of Void rock assembled from her elbow towards where the Outsider’s fingers were still curled as though around a wrist, and from his grasp outwards, there grew a palm, fingers — her new hand.

The Outsider let go of her, and the pain receded, slowly ebbing away. Experimentally, she curled her fingers, and held up her left hand beside the right. For all that they were rock and metal parts, her fingers looked exactly as she remembered them. The arm she had lost and won… had it now been lost again? Or had she simply exchanged it for something better, something truer to what the Void had done to her? She thought of Emily’s shadow self, its teeth and claws and murderous grimace, of Corvo’s mask and his rats, and Daud’s carved-up body, his splintered self lingering in tricks of the light when he transversed in quick succession. Were they all making monsters of themselves to pay the price of powers they did not deserve? Might they all one day wish they’d done to themselves as Emily had done to Breanna Ashworth?

But she was the one who had lost a limb, she reminded herself, the one who’d had pieces of herself cut away, gouged out; only to have them back and lose them once again. By her own will? She wanted to say yes.

“What about my eye?”

The Outsider produced something else from behind his back: it looked like a shard of Void rock, but it held a red orb, glowing, at its centre. _Put it on_.

It reminded Billie of her eyepatch. She took it from the Outsider’s hand, and turned it in her fingers. Taking a deep breath, she looked at him. His manner was grave.

“Are we fucking it all up?” she found herself asking.

He didn’t answer.

For want of anything else to say, she lifted the shard to her face, fitting it over her brow, her cheekbone and her eye. Like pins digging into her skin, it moulded itself against her, and she gasped when she realised she’d lost the power to move her right eye. She did not have to turn her head to see, but it… did not move anymore. She remembered that feeling, too.

“And no-one else can see?”

_Unless you show them, the same way I showed you._

“It feels… strange,” she said, turning her hand in front of her face. “But still part of me.”

 _It is. The Void is part of you now._ The Outsider did not sound triumphant, nor victorious. If anything, perhaps he sounded tired.

She remembered something he’d said earlier. “So Delilah tore these new holes in the world?“ She frowned. “What about Daud?”

 _Daud left because the Void let him,_ the Outsider explained, more or less. _Delilah ripped a tear into the veil between the worlds to escape. She tore out a piece of herself and kept it safe in a bone and cast-iron prison. For Delilah, flesh and steel were enough to make herself immortal, but she did not realise the ramifications of her departure._

“And the Void… it knows,“ Billie concluded.

_The Void always knows._

Just to see if she could, Billie clenched her left hand — there was no Mark there to glow or smoke, but her heart jolted when there was Void swirling around her fist anyhow.

“What can I do?” she asked.

* * *

 

Billie woke in the morning, and for a moment she was unsure whether she’d not dreamt all of it. But then she raised her hand to her face, her fingers made of Void and steel, and where her eye used to be there was a shard of one that belonged to a dead god. That was how the Outsider had explained it, something else hiding behind his expression that she not yet dared question. It would come, in time, the curiosity and the knowing. For now, she was burdened enough by her decision. The Outsider had told her that anything she wanted to do she could do without powers, without having the void whisper songs and lies into her ear. She’d chosen to believe him, and still she’d chosen to be marked, in some fashion. She’d chosen the Void.

 _Like father, like daughter_ , had been the Outsider’s last words to her, after encouraging her to go out into the Void and _tell_ the Void what she wanted to do. She was reasonably sure that that wasn’t how it worked, but after he’d left her, she’d remained in the Void for a moment longer and thought. He’d claimed he wished to give her sight to see, she remembered. From Daud’s lessons after sharing his powers with her, she knew that the Void inside them needed no speeches, no long-winded instructions. It responded to desire, to intent and will. So as she wished to see, she felt herself wrenched out of her body’s grasp and flung into the space around her. She looked down, and there she was, caught — in time, in rapture, who could know? She pushed on, testing the magic’s reach. There was an island floating above, all wretched rock and shadow, and she was drawn to it. It was too far to transverse, surely, if she could. Briefly, something inside her jolted at the thought of being able to pull herself through the air again, defying gravity and songs. _Try_ , something seemed to whisper at her, so she did. She floated further upwards, and focused on that island, that little speck of Void in an ocean that looked like the night sky, only there were no stars and would never be. She reached out, with her spirit — with her soul? — as if to touch, and before her eyes there appeared a shadow of herself, flickering, breaking apart and coming back together. She only had another moment to stare before she was pulled back into herself.

Disoriented for a moment, she shook her head, and then looked up towards the rock. Her shadow self was still there. She tilted her head, then reached out her left hand, fingers outstretched. A tether appeared between them, a wide arc. She willed herself to hear Daud’s voice, a reminder of so many years ago.

 _Jump_.

She jumped.

Landing on the island, her arms out wide to steady herself, she gasped.

“Shit. It worked.”

Shortly after, she’d found herself back on the Wale, back on her cot and in her sleep clothes. Was is modesty that let the Outsider pull them into the Void in their usual clothes rather than their pyjamas, she asked herself cynically as she got up and set about making breakfast. While she ate her porridge and toast, she wondered whether there would be more powers she had not yet discovered. Would she be able to carve bonecharms? Corvo and Daud had never learnt, although she suspected the latter knew something about it from his mother but refused to talk about it as he did with most of his past. Perhaps Corvo knew, but he was a book with seven seals when it came to things revealed to him in confidence. Emily had started carving a little during her last few weeks in Karnaca, but Billie — or, rather, Meagan — had not let her interest show. The powers Daud had shared with the Whalers had been tailored to the needs of an assassin: to move like a ghost through others’ lives and death, undetected and only flicking a few switches here and there to achieve their ends. They’d never been able to conjure rat swarms or gusts of wind strong enough to cast grown men into walls; and Daud had taught them to use Pull on things rather than people, on the grounds that it wasn’t quiet. _No shit, Daud_ , she thought with a huff.

Would the Void now gift her with something else, something a little more adventurous? Idly she remembered that she’d always thought the Whalers’ garb had never been much for disguises. Perhaps this time that might change.

*

When she knocked on Corvo and Daud’s door, she was confronted, moments later, with Martha’s face; and instantly trepidation gripped her. She swallowed the gasp that threatened to escape — but the expected look of revulsion never came. Nearly too late, she remembered what the Outsider had said: only those touched by the Void would know.

“Billie!”

Willing herself to stay calm, she nodded, then remembered that she should say something.

“Martha,” she tried. Good enough.

Martha smiled, and made room for her to step inside. “Honestly, Corvo and Daud should just give you your own key.”

Billie nearly lost her breath and, turning her surprise into a cough, shook her head.

“I don’t plan on being here that often,” she replied as she moved into the hallway. “This district is hardly my place.” It confused her when Martha frowned at her.

“It is if you’re working with the Royal Pro—” Martha caught herself, continued, “Corvo and Daud.” She shrugged at her blunder. Obviously old habits died hard — Billie knew a story or two to tell about that as well. “It is if you give a damn about the people, especially those _not_ living in this district.”

“If you’re done with the sermon,” Daud said as he appeared at the other end of the corridor; not the study but the kitchen, holding a newspaper. “Watch me make coffee and—” He’d looked up, and stopped. Stared at Billie as though she had the Outsider himself with her, hovering by her shoulder. “Corvo.”

“What is it?” Corvo came up behind Daud. He followed Daud’s gaze, and ceased to speak.

Beside Billie, Martha was frowning with worry, now. “What’s wrong? Billie?” She moved around her, to see her better, but she would not find anything amiss. And Billie found herself not yet ready to reveal the truth to her.

“She’s marked,” Daud growled, as if to spare Billie the explanation — a kindness belied by the disappointment in his voice. “We can _tell_.”

“Oh,” Martha issued softly, and something inside Billie twisted at knowing she would have to shatter the illusion sooner or later. Wanting to was not something she wished to examine, just yet.

* * *

 

Billie set out for Upper Cyria the next day. There was no time to waste, as the investigation would likely take her more than a day. To track down a knife she only had a drawing of — her own sketch of a drawing, rather — was a fool’s errand, and yet here she was. Because of Eleuterio and Teresia Cienfuegos, because of the Eyeless’s arrogance, because of all of the chaos and suffering stirred up and inflicted in the name of the Void — in the name of the Outsider. Because Daud had asked. She scoffed. She was a fool.

And the Outsider was, too, if he thought that saving the world from going howling into the Void was something she was interested in doing.

She climbed out of the skiff and secured it by the canal’s pier. A smuggler’s bark was sitting in the water on the other side, its captain nowhere to be seen. Better move that quickly, before the Grand Guard find the good first, she thought, but paid it no more mind. Wasn’t her problem if merchants in the area were careless with their wares. She was about to leave before she halted. Unless… the smugglers were undoubtedly working with the Eyeless; or, at the very least, the Eyeless were providing _protection_ for the black market shops in the area. There was one just below Ferella Way.

She turned. A quick look probably wouldn’t hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) lol the Outsider’s like a 256bit modem  
> b) I’m very conscious of the fact that the body Arkane truly chose to mutilate in marking a character was that of a black woman. It’s why I’ve given Billie options, and why the Outsider is being very deliberate here. I still wanted these things to come from him, and I still wanted Billie’s arc to continue with the fallout of losing and then regaining her arm and eye, but there’s room for criticism in doing it this way at all.


End file.
